Some Visiting

Yesterday, we went to Pratt, then to Hesston to visit relatives. Our first stop was in Pratt at the local care home where our first cousin, once removed, was living. Now, you might ask why we went all that way to see a cousin that is “once removed”. We do things a little differently in our family. Folks who are related to us are important to us. They are our connection with our ancestors, our heritage, and our upbringing, all of which we value very highly. We also know that she has no other close relatives besides a son who has not visited her in many years. And we know she provides a valuable link to a part of our family that we know very little about.
We then went to Hesston and saw several relatives…an uncle by marriage, a blood uncle and his wife (our aunt as certainly as if she was a blood relative), and a first cousin. We also happened upon a woman in the hall of the assisted living complex who was our first cousin once removed from the other side of our family. She was someone we previously had not known, and know very little about her parents…her mom being our great aunt. She was very willing to visit and invited us back for another visit and look through some of her old photos, etc.
We seldom go as far as third cousins or some such, as that gets rather far afield, although we certainly recognize them and their lineage as it relates to our common ancestor(s). We have a genealogy person in our family who likes this kind of thing, and we sometimes are able to gather bits of data for her. All in all, it was a good day and very satisfying for us. I trust it was for the folks we visited as well.
Each time we visit, I am struck yet again by the stories we tell of those relatives now gone. They lived good lives, but life was in many cases hard and sometimes seemingly cruel. Survival during the Great Depression often meant gathering berries from the roadside in order to have something to eat, or frying a flour and oil concoction in a pan and calling it a meal. Medicine was primitive by today’s standards and quarantines were not unusual. Nor were illnesses like scarlet fever, mumps, measles, or tetanus. Running water and indoor plumbing were not always available and starting over in life was an all-too-routine thing to do. Medicare and Medicaid were but a dream in a progressive’s eye.
These people lived, in good part, with reliance on and faith in Someone greater than themselves. They knew they were at the mercy of the elements, the depression, and the illnesses that plagued them. Yet they persisted, they persevered, they finished the course in this race called life. And for that example, we “moderns” owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.