I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: genealogy

  • the 21 club


    Although South Carolina has been my home state for nearly 50 years, I was born and grew up in Texas. During one of my countless classic goodbye scenes with my parents in my early twenties, daddy quoted one of his favorite sayings, “you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.” No truer words were ever spoken. My reasons for leaving the state were complicated but boiled down to my attempt to figure out how to live an authentic life as a lesbian away from a family I assumed would not be supportive. I yearned for freedom – from what? As the song “Desperado” reminds me: freedom, oh freedom…that’s just some people talking.

    From 2010 – 2014 I had a second chance to live in Texas by buying another home there in order to care for my mother who was then a freedom seeker herself in a losing battle with dementia that destroyed the woman she had been. While these second chance Texas years were deeply painful, they also gave me an opportunity to experience a new relationship with my mother as well as to renew family bonds with many cousins I had rarely seen for several decades.

    Two of the cousins I spent time with were Eloise Robinson Powell and Frances Kelly Lee. Frances drove me to visit with Eloise in her home on O Avenue in Huntsville several times while I was there – as I had visited there when I was a child. Eloise was a double cousin – her mother married my grandmother’s brother, her father married my grandfather’s sister. Repeat three times.  Regardless of how you explain it, Eloise was a double first cousin of my father, and they were very close friends.

    This past week I learned that Eloise had left her home on O Avenue to move permanently into an assisted living facility in Huntsville. I felt despondent at the thought of that move, but I needn’t have. Eloise called me today, and we talked for almost an hour with lots of laughter and wonderful reminiscing about our double family ancestors. I can’t imagine how she felt about leaving her home of a lifetime, but I know for sure she took her memories with her. She is looking forward to an annual gathering of three friends on March 20th. in her new home where there will be cake, she told me, but no mention of her birthday on the 21st. She prefers to keep her birthdays to herself. I won’t tell either.

    I will tell Eloise is the second member of what we now call the 21 Club. Frances has a birthday on February 21st, Eloise is the 21st of March, I have April 21 and Pretty has May 21. None of us have any excuse for forgetting the other’s birthday, although I have to say Eloise is usually the only member to send a card. If I hadn’t had my second chance in Texas, I’m not sure the 21 Club would have been chartered.

    Earlier this week I received a surprise UPS package from my cousin Frances who is a regular cousin for me. Frances’s mother and my paternal grandmother were Robinson family sisters and oh my, what sisters they were. Whenever those two were together, the rest of the family wasn’t spared from their fun poking and gossip sessions. My grandmother and her sister Thelma got together as often as they could, and my grandmother invited me many times to drive the short distance to Conroe from Richards with her. I never said no to a trip with her.

    The UPS package Frances sent contained three family treasures from the house on O Avenue that Eloise asked Frances to ship to me. I was thrilled and wanted to share them with my cyberspace family.

    William James and Margaret Antonio Moore Morris family – circa 1903

    My great-grandma Morris is the unsmiling woman seated in the first row. She was born on July 14, 1864 and married my great-grandfather William on December 15, 1880. They had 11 children in 23 years. Nine of their children are in this picture. The eldest, John Thomas, had been told to leave home when he turned 18 so he was gone. The youngest, Bernice Louise, would not be born until 1906. The little boy to the right of Grandma Morris was my grandfather George Patton who was born in 1898. Eloise’s mother Hattie Jane was the woman standing to the left on the top row. Aunt Hattie was born in 1889.

    Margaret Antonio Moore Morris and William James Morris in younger days

    Margaret died on June 06, 1963 when she was 98 years old. Since I was 17 years old when she died, I had seen her several times throughout her life in Huntsville. I never met my great-grandfather because he died in 1927.  My most distinct memories of her were her tiny frame clothed in a black or navy dress, her frail appearance as she pushed a small chair in front of her that enabled her to walk through the house, long hair piled in a bun on top of her head, sweetest smile as she spoke, now let’s see, you must be Glenn’s daughter?

    The 21 Club and my great-grandmother Morris are part of my women’s history month. I celebrate these women for their strength, their courage in the face of adversity, our shared DNA, their ongoing sense of humor with stories that always make me laugh.

    When I talked to my cousin Eloise on the phone today, she told me a story about something that happened when she was in the third grade of her rural Crabbs Prairie elementary school in Walker County. The teacher asked the children in the class to give the definition of various words – one of them was the word “income.” One little girl raised her hand, stood up and said, “I opened the door and in come the dog.” The little girl forever was known as Income.

    my cousins Eloise (l.) and Frances in 2014

    (used without permission from anybody)

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The M Dot


     

    3. Bertha Emiline Selma Buls (08/02/1873 – 01/01/1956)

    m. Charles C. (Karl) Schlinke (01/09/1870 – 03/14/1953)

    …..3.5 Bernice Louise Schlinke (10/20/1898 – 04/19/1972)

    m. James Marion Boring (03/06/1887 – 09/20/1938)

    …..3.5.4 Selma Louise Boring (03/25/1927 – 04/25/2012)

    m. Glenn Lewis Morris (10/06/1924 – 06/30/1976)

    ……3.5.4.1 Sheila Rae Morris (04/21/1946 –  )

    I have a distant cousin who is the great-granddaughter of my great-grandmother’s sister on my mama’s side.  This cousin is working on the genealogy of our family and in that process has completed much of my ancestry as well.  I like the presentation and the numerical configuration of the generations in the chart she sent me this past week.

    For example, my great-grandmother was the third child in her family and was sensibly assigned the number 3 to start her descendants.  She married my great-grandfather and they had twelve children of their own according to the information I received this week.  I also know from oral history that they raised two other children who belonged to  a relative that either died or was unable to care for them.  The eleventh birth child died when she was two years old so they raised 13 children during their married life.

    My grandmother was the fifth child of the Schlinke family and so our numbers all begin with 3.5.  She married my grandfather and they had four children.  My grandfather died at an early age as a result of a car wreck which hospitalized him and ultimately resulted in pneumonia and his death.

    On a totally unrelated topic, a childhood friend called me last night and in the course of our conversation, her husband called to her from another room and told her to ask me if I knew my grandfather Boring had invented the machine that made soft serve ice cream.  I admitted I had never heard this story.  Apparently the reason we aren’t wealthy today from the invention is that his best friend stole the patent.  I found this remarkable and would like to know whether there is any truth to it.  I do know my grandfather had quite the entrepreneurial spirit and had owned a root beer stand, movie theater, restaurant and ice cream delivery business.  A soft serve ice cream invention sounds possible.

    I digress.  My mama was the fourth child of their marriage and the only daughter.  Her number on the chart is 3.5.4 and she married my daddy and they produced me a/k/a 3.5.4.1.  So far, so good.

    I’ve looked at this chart for several days and have had a great memory trip of the Schlinke family reunions in Houston and at our home in Richards, Texas.  The Schlinke children were boisterous, fun-loving, and entertaining for me as a child.  They were my great aunts and uncles and wonderful to their children and grand-children whenever we were together.  Each 3.– and the numbers below them were unique yet a blend of their siblings and parents.

    But while I enjoyed looking at these past generations, I had a nagging suspicion that something was not quite right about this chart.  I studied it and studied it…and studied it some more and all of a sudden it hit me.  I had no M Dot.  I was 3.5.4.1 on the chart, and then that part of our line stopped dead in its tracks.  It was like the Rapture had come and I had been taken without leaving any sense of who my family was.  No M Dot.  There were certainly others who had no M Dot on the tree, and I don’t know if they had committed family relationships or not, but I know for sure I do.

    I have been a lukewarm advocate for marriage equality in the GLBTQ movement.  When I was working actively for social justice issues in the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, the idea of same-sex marriage in my lifetime seemed impossible.  I worked for domestic partner benefits in the workplace.  I worked for non-discrimination in housing in the City of Columbia.  I worked for the partners of HIV/AIDS patients to be able to visit together in our hospitals.  I worked to have domestic partners included as beneficiaries of life insurance contracts because they had an insurable interest in the owner of the contract.  But marriage equality was Beyond Thunder Dome to me.

    The year is now 2014 and 19 states and the District of Columbia recognize same-sex marriage.  Many of my friends in South Carolina have traveled to one of these states and taken vows in a marriage ceremony.  I’ve seen their pictures and read their stories on facebook, and they’ve told me about their experiences and the affirmation those legal marriages afford them. While I can rejoice with my friends, I never really yearned to join them.  Teresa and I wear the matching gold bands – we have the jewelry – as my friend Robyn told us, and that has been enough.

    Thanks to the vision and courage of our community leaders, federal laws are changing quickly and I now believe a real possibility exists for modifying the Social Security system to correct the inequities and discrimination of the past against same-sex spouses in survivor and retirement benefits.  Holy mackerel.  Possibly I need to get married for what is no longer pie-in-the-sky financial dreams.  I think I’ll wait to see if it really happens first.

    It was the M dot that jolted me out of my sense of complacency about marriage and marriage equality.  Nothing is more important to me than my family, the one I have today and the ones that have now become my ancestors. A hundred years from now when another descendant of my great- grandmother Selma Buls Schlinke is studying our family chart, I want them to know one of their relatives was a lesbian who lived and loved in a strange time when her sexual orientation was an issue but she had an M dot in spite of it.

       As we drifted off to sleep last night, I told Teresa I would like to marry her because I didn’t have an M dot on my family tree.  She asked me if I thought that was a good reason to get married so I knew I had phrased the proposal badly.  Okay, so I need a little refresher course.  Words are my business.  I will do better.