While We're Melting

 

The heat wave continues. While a genea-friend and I met for coffee in air-conditioned comfort, of course we complained about the roasting temperatures. But then we realized how good we had it, despite melting through week two of hundred-plus-degree weather. After all, air conditioning wasn't widespread in the United States until the late 1960s. Many of our parents grew up in homes without that luxury, and likely worked in offices or factories without it—or perhaps out in the fields under the blazing sun.

"Our ancestors had it so hard," my friend observed, considering how rough her own father's life had been. Times were different back then, yet we can hardly appreciate the magnitude of that statement because we don't even have a reference point from which to understand it.

That was also a conversation point last week during our genealogical society's special interest group meeting for members researching their Tennessee roots. Yes, I know: we're in California, but many of our members discovered a common link reaching back to pre-Civil War Tennessee, especially around Knoxville and the northeastern portion of that state. People moved when they thought life would become better for them, and many followed a similar pattern, bringing them from Tennessee to Arkansas, to Oklahoma and, once the Dust Bowl years hit, all the way out to California. It wasn't for a wonderful vacation trip to Disneyland that those folks made their long journey westward.

It's only in taking time to extract the biographical aspects of our genealogical discoveries that we begin to piece together just how difficult life must have been for our ancestors—even for our more recent relatives. Sometimes a photograph may help with the process, if it affords us a glimpse at how life really was for those ancestors. My coffee companion recited some of the details she had spotted in photographs of her parents' early years in poorer, rural regions of California.

And yet, in learning those details, perhaps it opens our eyes to the benefits of such difficulties: the skills and personal resilience developed through life's challenges. When the heat goes up, it does something to us. Perhaps it's what's left over after we've been melted down that is really what makes us what we are.