Celeste Chandler Family History
Friday, September 16, 2016
Once a
little girl, with ears to hear, tugged at a grandmother’s sleeve and asked the
older lady to tell her a story . . .
There
is a good deal to be said for oral history.
It may not take the place of an old document, but it is infinitely more
interesting. The colorful slants on a
situation or thing assumed by the teller paint a picture of an attitude of the
time better than any cold piece of paper can.
The memories passed on are filtered, teller after teller, until only the
main nugget or interest remains. Embroidered
they may be, and each embroidered layer has misled many a descendent, but
somewhere even in the telling of them lies a fact, or the story would not be
worthy of its passage through conversations over the years.
On and
on the stories go, unwinding like a ball of colorful yarn to spill on the lap
of the little girl who would one day set out to see for herself which of those
stories were embroidered, and which held an element of truth. Her dream would be to take all of the
colorful yarn and knit it together into a grand adventure of a coverlet to wrap
securely around a family’s sense of self.
I have yet to prove all of those stories, but all I have found,
contained that ‘nugget of truth’. And
more than a few of those stories have pointed me in the direction of the aged
document called ‘proof’.
The
documents we want, for they prove our names and dates upon the paper. But the oral history is in some way, so much
more precious. How many times, I have
wondered, were the stories my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents told me,
told before? How many ears have heard
them, and how many heard them with ears that were awake?
It has
been well over twenty years since I started this adventure into researching my
ancestry. Now I find it is time I put it
all somewhere safe, somewhere it can be shared, else it die with me when I
pass. So I am putting these stories onto
the cold pieces of paper, along with the documents I found through this
journey.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
So I decided to start a blog. When I went to Blogger.com I discovered something I thought long gone, something I had forgotten about. Dad had started a blog 4 years ago titled 'Awed By Life', and I was apparently still following it. He didn't get too far, but the nuts and bolts of his 'plan' are there:
Ted Chandler's Awed by Life
Ted Chandler's Awed by Life
Amazon Author Page for Celeste
You can check here for books I have available. Only one so far; Beds I have Slept In. Not what you would think from the title. It is my grandmothers memoirs that she did not get the chance to publish prior to her death.
Coming soon will be The George Chandler Letter collection which includes letters dating back to 1852. George was my 2G Grandfather.
You can check here for books I have available. Only one so far; Beds I have Slept In. Not what you would think from the title. It is my grandmothers memoirs that she did not get the chance to publish prior to her death.
Coming soon will be The George Chandler Letter collection which includes letters dating back to 1852. George was my 2G Grandfather.
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