Mother Lines Genealogy
– Part 1 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Anyone
who has done genealogy as a hobby knows how exciting it is to find the name of
a man’s wife. A whole new branch on the
family tree opens above her.
Unfortunately,
most of the research centers on her father, because details about a woman’s
life are usually limited to her birth (or christening), marriage, and death.
“Would
I want my life reduced to those dates alone?” I asked myself as I was putting
together family trees to give out as Christmas presents as well as Photostats
of family photos with identifications photographed along with them.
I
have hedged my bets against this happening by keeping journals since the age of
ten when I began doing genealogy for a school project, which included
interviewing and taping grandparents and parents.
However,
I wanted to do something for the women on my family tree chart to flesh out
their existence a bit.
I
thought of doing research on food, since almost all women in the past had
responsibility for cooking it or supervising staff who did.
Best
of all, I could make use of my family’s treasure to do the initial research:
103-year-old Aunt Winnie, my grandfather’s sister, who had gone to college at
the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater to earn a teaching degree along with
her older sister.
(My
great-grandfather William Sawle, a ship captain turned famer, thought educating
women was more important than educating men, because they raised children.)
Aunt
Winnie would use any pretext for entertaining guests and immediately invited me
over for the weekend. After working her
crossword puzzle in the morning after my arrival, she told me that I would have
to measure out the various ingredients, because she did everything “by eye.”
Her
living room sized kitchen had a real iron, wood burning stove and a six-foot
gray marble counter top in the pantry.
Even
though I was in my thirties, Aunt Winnie still called me her “little lemonade
maker,” because that is what I begged to do every time I went to visit “the
farm,” whose name was Rosevale. Lemonade
was the only beverage served on the screened in back porch where we ate
“dinner” at lunch time and “supper” at dinner time.
The
official lemonade recipe I measured out follows:
-one
cup of sugar
-juice
of two lemons
-3
quarts of water
Aunt
Winnie shared a trick for adding flavor to this basic preparation:
Slice
the lemon rind in ringlets and crush them to release their oil. The lemon ringlets look festive in the
glasses as well.
What
Aunt Winnie was most popular for were her cookies. She kept them in a stemmed glass bowl on low,
marble topped table for children on the back porch. The anise, sorghum, and molasses cookies she
kept there intrigued generations of Sawle family children. (Sawle is my mother’s maiden name.)
I
refused to believe that the anise cookies I loved as a child were related to
black licorice, a candy I still dislike.
I thought the cookies were made with vegetable shortening like Crisco.
“You
really don’t use Crisco to make those cookies, do you?” I asked a few times.
“Lard
isn’t Crisco,” Aunt Winnie finally responded.
“Real
lard is good for you,” she continued.
“What
is lard made of?” I asked.
“Lard
is the rendered fat of a pig,” Aunt Winnie continued with her real world food
lesson.
She
was ignoring me and answering my question at the same time.
“I
wish they had invented plastic wrap when my mother was alive. Whenever we butchered a pig, there was so
much blood, and mother kept changing the sheets to keep everything clean. She would have loved throwing away plastic
wrap,” Aunt Winnie said.
Aunt
Winnie could tell I was squeamish about these food details, but later in life I
am happy to say that my ancestors could butcher a pig like Italy’s famous
Norcian butchers.
End
of Part 1.
To
be continued.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
