Part One — Inside My DNA Part Two — A Love Story
Prologue
Yet again, I started to write something brief and it’s now a multi-part project. Something leads to another then to another.
This was going to be the story of how my great grandmother, Myrtle Nix Gold (Mummum), regained her eyesight after around 15 years of blindness. It was restored by a smack on the side of her head from a teething toy waved about by a squirming toddler on her lap. It’s a true story. I was there. I was three years old and I wasn’t the assailant, but I was there.
This event was not only reported in local and state newspapers and television news in Oklahoma but nationally as well, including a spread in The National Enquirer. Perhaps some reader of this will think, Wait! That was your great grandmother? I know that story!
Perhaps not.
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Mummum’s story is still at the heart of this project. I told the story of her return from blindness to a good friend in New York recently, adding that as kids, my brother and I spent a lot of time with her, at the house she shared with her sister, Aunt Maud, and later when she came to live with us. So I had direct access to someone who’d come of age nearly a century earlier. I characterized her life by saying that when she was young, she crossed the country in a wagon but before she died, she flew in an airplane.
I also told him how much I regretted not asking her more about her early life, but as a child, you really wouldn’t understand why you should do that, right? She died when I was 12.
From there, the conversation turned to the questions of when did my mother’s and father’s ancestors come to Oklahoma, then to the U.S. in general, and from where. Not for the first time, my answer (I didn’t know) struck the questioner as a bit sad. He’d moved to New York a few years after I did, from London, and knew quite a bit about his own deeper European heritage.
I proposed that people coming across the Atlantic to America who remained on the east coast, in enclaves of fellow immigrants from the same place, were more purposeful in maintaining traditions of their culture. But those who kept moving further west were more likely to shuck it all and be, first and foremost, Americans. I base this theory on absolutely no empirical evidence whatsoever. What I know is that I don’t remember anyone in my family particularly caring about where we came from in Europe. At various times, I heard Scotland, England, Ireland, Germany, but all were guesses, offered with shrugs, in a tone that meant it was the end of a conversation, not the beginning of one.
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Now…
I would never say I was obsessed with finding my family origins. While I was envious of people who had closer connections to their ancestry, I never myself felt particularly shortchanged by not knowing. And if I ever did, it didn’t last very long. But every once in a while I thought about it, and about all of those other “once in a whiles” when the question came to mind and I did nothing to answer it.
But this time, I did.
I realized I had the means at hand to see where investigating my family tree(s) would lead: a recent DNA test, an extraordinary family history from a great aunt, and online resources that provide access to a staggering amount of information and documents. Then there was the final definitive spark of motivation:
Being out of work, I really didn’t have anything better to do.
So here we go. With this done, I’ll keep looking for that National Enquirer story about Mummum. There are other newspaper accounts of what happened but I’d love to have that one in hand.