The people in our past

I had something different that I wanted to write about today. I realized there was going to be some backstory that I would be referring to, so it just made sense to start with the backstory.

Going back on the Harris side, my great-great grandfather was Monroe Micajah Harris. I have had complicated feelings about him, even though he died 64 years before I was born.

It started with things that I heard when extended family was chatting. I don't even know how it came up, but I would have been pretty young. The word was that the reason my great grandfather Jesse moved West and North, from Tennessee to South Dakota, was that he didn't like his stepmother.

When I was about fourteen, a social studies project where I did a family tree led to me submitting various names to the temple. I remember seeing Monroe had three wives, and more children with each wife. It gave me this impression of him as a selfish man who didn't even think of whether he was alienating his children. That's how I thought of him until about 1995.

Some distant cousins put together a family history Monroe's parents, Hannah Wells and Jesse Harris (my great-grandfather was named after my great=great-great grandfather). 

I pored over The Harris Wheel, updating my family information. That data was valuable, but what I remember most was a letter from Monroe's last surviving daughter, Thelma, writing about growing up.

She had spent a lot of time with relatives, because her mother had died as well. I remember the line, "Dad wasn't much of a hand with all of us kids."

It had never occurred to me before how hard it must have been being widowed, and suddenly responsible for all of these children without much idea what to do with them. Remarrying could have been see as something to do for the children, but then it also brought more children. Those children may have been desired and probably were, but options were limited then too.

The next thing happened just about two years ago when I did my genogram.

Here is the other family gossip that I had picked up. Again, I don't remember details, but I know it was not the same time as the part about the stepmother. Someone said great-grandfather Jesse was a falling down drunk; they kept him in a separate cabin behind the house because of that.

When I first started looking at that part of my family, the first thing that came to me was how strong his wife Nellie had to have been, keeping things together under those circumstances. 

Then, when I looked at him, I felt great compassion. 

His mother died the year he was born. I don't know that it was in childbirth, but he got his first stepmother at the age of two. He might have bonded with her. She died when he was fifteen. He may not have liked his father's next wife - who came along seven years later - but it may not have been the only thing going on.

Of course, part of growing up is learning that family gossip is not always accurate or fair, especially with some of my aunts. Of course, that falling-down drunk was their grandfather, so maybe everything was accurate, but I was not there.

There may be something else that I could hold against Monroe, and that will be the topic of the next post, but no one thing can be all he is. That is true for all of us.

Our hearts are supposed to be turned to each other. We say that about family history but I believe has broader meaning. Part of that is going to include being about to see the good and the bad. It does not mean excusing the bad, or trying to call it good, but it can mean finding ways to empathize, love, and forgive.