Some of us know a lot about where our families came from and
what our great-grandparents did to keep food on the table during the Great
Depression. Others have a Great Aunt Minnie wants to tell stories about what
her parents did when the shoe factory in Massachusetts closed or the Ford plant
in Detroit laid off one thousand people. But, we're busy, so we may nod politely
or make sure the holiday eggnog is in a different room so we don't have to
listen.
Her stories would be a lot to miss.
Growing up, I heard about my father's family of nine
siblings and his mother's indomitable spirit as a widow whose youngest was an
infant. Spread across the country, the nine of them stayed in regular touch in
the days of snail mail, and periodically even the far-flung families met at an
aunt's farm in Mount Vernon, Missouri. I knew which uncle was in which branch
of the service during World War II, and was happy that my mother went from
Kansas to DC to work during the war. If not, she would not have roomed with my
father's sister and met my dad.
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| Built on Orr land, Ozark Prairie Presbyterian Church |
I thought I knew a lot. I knew next to nothing. In the early
1990s, business trips took me to the Midwest, so I (who, with my sister, stayed
home with our mom who had MS rather than take trips to Missouri in our teens)
spent time with elderly aunts and uncles in Mount Vernon. The stories about how
my dad refused to go to school at age six, beating his mother home three days in a row, were funny. Even better was learning why my ancestors ended up in the
state in the 1830s and what they did to build a church community and town.
A group of extended family has met annually since 1937, the
100th anniversary of the first arrival of Paul Orr and Isabelle Boyd's
descendants in southwest Missouri. The initial families had gone to
Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Missouri. Several forward-thinking ancestors (Lettie
Hickman Wilkes, assisted by Jessie Stemmons and Harold Campbell) had compiled stories
and a list of known descendants in 1954. That year marked the 100th anniversary
of the church the Missouri family helped found, Ozark Prairie Presbyterian
Church.
Several of the family stalwarts were quite elderly, and
within a short time of attending
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| Family tree roll-out. We add new births annually. |
reunions, I was secretary-historian of the
OrrReunion Association of Mount Vernon. With the job came a lot of articles, letters,
and photos that predecessors, such as Eleanor Coffield of Carthage and Mary
Frances (Orr) Schnake, had stored.
Since I knew nothing (and have more than an inclination
toward OCD), it became important to sort and organize the materials and identify
people in--literally--one hundred years of photos. It would not have been
possible without the keen memory of Mary Isabel (Hill) Matteson and
encouragement from a cousin's daughter, Kathy Seneker Fairchild, who had already
written much about local Missouri history. Just this year, we received decades
of files from the late Mary Beth (Hickman) Barger. In many families, a carload
of photos and files would end up in the local landfill. Because of the Orr
Reunion, her daughter, Barbara, had a place to take them. The sorting will take
a while, but we'll all be enriched.
Why name all these people? Why not get to this article's
purpose of why writing about family history is important? Because you can't
write about it now unless earlier generations have collected the stories. Sure,
you can look at Census data or find wills in county courthouses. You'll learn
ancestors' occupations and assets, but not a lot more.
Family history is significant because you know how your
family fits into a country's history. Why did so many Orrs go from Missouri to
Oklahoma in the late 1800s? Because land was available -- largely to white
people, at the expense of Native Americans. We also know that William J. Orr
and wife Ella Cochran moved across the Oologah River at Sander's Ford. Ella was
a teacher and taught the officers' children at Fort Gibson. She took her own
children there to teach. Plus, several people married Native Americans, so now
the Irish Orrs are kin to this nation's earliest settlers.
Writing about family history lets others link to their
ancestors. While I've prepared (with much input, especially from Mary Ann
Vincent, a Shirley descendant) a book on the
Orr family of Aghadowey, Northern Ireland, and the U.S.,
it's the postings on Ancestry.com that reach the most people. I look at who
downloads the material and can often tell where they live -- they are all over
the North American map, some are from Australia, a few are from Ireland. There
have been many notes from people saying that a photo that made its way from reunion
files to the Internet has given them the first image of ancestors. More important,
relatives who never heard of the Orr Reunion of Mount Vernon have learned of us
and attended.
At past reunions, I've given talks on the family's
immigration patterns, the many who operated grist mills, and the extent to
which members worked in coal mines in the east and strip mines in the Midwest.
This year, the project is military history. Longtime secretary Grace Shepherd
compiled an Honor Roll of the fifty-seven men who served during World War II in
U.S. or U.K. branches of the military. Some ancestors served as early as the
Civil War, others were in World War I, Korea, or Vietnam, and some still serve.
We also have at least one who performed service during World War II as a
conscientious objector.
We'll seek input from the hundreds of relatives we know, and
perhaps find more to ask. We'll also look for the roles women played in the
past. Some were in the Red Cross or worked at munitions plants. My own mother
(H. Rita Rooney Orr) worked as a 'spotter' one night a week at Andrews AFB near
DC. The women who did this were looking for enemy planes that might attack Washington.
There is always more to write. It is getting harder to store
the material. So we don't lose it, we're scanning a lot. Who knows, maybe a
library will find us sufficiently interesting to keep some of it. It's probably
time to look for one.
* * * *
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Common Ground is a play in one act, with four scenes. Three very different couples sit in three kitchens discussing plans to relocate. Some people are pleased, others don't want change, and one wants to ignore a very big problem. The first three scenes lead to a picnic, which includes the couples' adult children, some of whom are puzzled at their parents' choices. And amused. Since I've been writing mysteries for years, there has to be a twist at the end. That makes the story hard to describe -- giving away the ending would cut down on reader enjoyment.
