🎶Let's gooooo baaaack, back to the begiiiinnniiinnngg🎶
Oh I'm sorry, do YOU know the story of how your grandparents met and fell in love? Oh you DO?? Woooow good for you for being interested in other people, I guess 🏆👍🏻🏅
We’ll be starting this journey with - and keep coming back to - my grandparents.
If this were a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, this would be the chapter that the book sends you back to after you make a choice that ends in the death of everyone in your traveling party or some other disaster that the book basically frames with “Hey, bad choice…you keep making those? So maybe go back to the origin chapter and read that over again so you actually can figure out what you’re even doing here in the first place?!”
A.k.a., my grandparents will represent four forks in the road: We’ll pick a grandparent and then follow their ancestry path all the way up through ages until we hit a brick wall, and then we’ll come back down and choose the next grandparent whose heritage we’ll follow through history.
Capisce?
We’ll be starting on the paternal side, and with my Grandmother Gladys.
You don’t even want to know how many times I had to correct and spellcheck that last name
Of all my grandparents, she’s the one I know the least about (she passed away before I was born)…and yet her ancestral story unfolded to reveal the most fascinating and far-reaching lineage of all.
She was born in September (omg, a Virgo!) of 1923 in Erie Township (Becker County) Minnesota, to Carl Eidenschink and Clara French.
I guess hunks really do make passes at girls in glasses?!? More on these two in the next chapter!
Gladys was the oldest of 5 children:
On April 11, 1944, she married James “Jim” Carter, a handsome serviceman who was also known as “Tex” to his friends:
I ❤️ this photo of them.
Check out this very attractive wedding party?! Flex less, grandparents!
Why did his friends call him Tex? I have no idea! How did Gladys and Jim meet? Also NO IDEA! If my dad or any of my aunts or uncle know the answer to this, please feel free to hit up the comments and fill us in!
Speaking of not knowing anything…
A few years, during my first attempt at this project, I posted this to my Facebook page:
Not to get all Thought Catalog clickbait headline on y’all, but what happened next was something I never could have predicted:
Can I just tell you?? How I think about Auntie Bert’s comment all the time, the one about my dad coming home on weekends when he was in college to bake bread and go to church with his mom? Being able to hear these stories from my aunts, extended relatives, and family friends, and especially getting to read about all those memories of our grandparents from my older cousins…this whole comment section was so, so special and magical. I’m not even joking when I tell you that these screenshots are now some of my most treasured possessions.
(This comment section is also why, even though I HATE Meta, I can’t bring myself to delete Facebook)
I’m really hoping that this project kicks off even more of these conversations and sharing of memories for everyone in my family. Especially since, tbh, I haven’t really learned that much more about Grandma Gladys and Grandpa Jim since I first started this. I also should probably ask my dad more stuff about his parents and childhood??? I know my brothers gave my parents one of those “Tell us all about your life!” memory books/recordings for Christmas last year or the year before, and my mom asked if I wanted a copy of it when they were done (also feels like Kris or Dan should asked me if I wanted in on the gift? Especially since I always ask if they want in on what I’m doing for gifts? I’ll be sure to mention that when Kris’ and Dan’s grandkids want to know more about them someday…).
We’ll also talk more about Grandpa Jim after we’ve journeyed the exciting, winding path that’s Gladys’ ancestry.
Anyway, fam, if you’re reading this and would like to share some more favorite memories or formative stories about Grandma Gladys, I would love to hear them! (I’ll also add them to this post later so that it can be part of the True Story record and thus that much more easily shared in the future with family and friends). In the next chapter, we’ll talk about Gladys’ parents, Carl and Clara, and I’m also dying for any and all stories about them, too (we’ll talk more about Grandpa Jim and his family after we’ve journeyed the winding and remarkable path that’s Gladys’ ancestry).
Never thought I’d get to a place in life where I was interested in stories that didn’t specifically feature me, but here we are!!!
(Although, I mean…we do have some saints in this particular ancestral line, so. Maybe I’m just starting to take after them??)
Anyway! Tender kisses on those cold cheeks,
-Amber