History (part 1)

My mom has been cleaning out her storage space, and in addition to a cabinet, table, chairs, and antique secretary's desk, she's left several boxes of old photos and documents for me to go through.

I expected these to be mostly childhood scribblings of mine. Such detritus seems to proliferate in the back cupboards of parents, and I'd already gone through a few such "thinning" expeditions in the last couple of years.

I'm working through the first batch and have already found some treasures I wasn't expecting. A small vinyl record of the first moon landing was surprising, but it is nothing compared to some documents I found paperclipped together.

Three pages are sketchy genealogical notes, one is a handwritten letter, and one is from the Secretary of the Navy. The handwritten letter is from my paternal grandfather, Martin, to his brother Louis. This took me a moment, since my Dad's name was Louis and he never mentioned an uncle. Then again, he rarely talked about his family at all. The letter is dated November 4th, 1942, and is primarily about the details of a gear that Martin was crafting to fix my grandmother Elsie's washing machine. Parts were unavailable due to the war effort, so he was making one himself at the Caterpillar factory where he worked. Two and a half pages of grammatically questionable description of a gear, after apologizing for not writing more often. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone would save this. At the very end, Mary mentions that Elsie is five months pregnant. "Ah," I thought, "that's the significance. That would be when she was pregnant with my father." Still, I wasn't sure why mom had the letter.

Then I read the attached telegram from the Secretary of the Navy. According to the telegram, on November 15th, 1942, 11 days after Martin wrote the letter, Louis' ship, the Preston was sunk. There were few survivors, and the ship sank rapidly. Louis had been "Missing in Action" for a year, and the telegram was to inform my great grandmother that her son was officially considered deceased.

He was a machinist, first class. That explained why the entire letter was about gears, and why my grandfather quipped near the end that Louis could take the letter to a machinist if he didn't understand any of what was written.

So, now I know why my dad was named Louis. He was named for the brother who never heard about the jury-rigged gear for my grandmother's washing machine. He was named for the one who was lost.

Also of interest is that my Great Grandmother, Una Garfield Wilson, lived on E 14th St, right off of Lake Merritt. I can only assume by the fact that it was addressed to her, that my Great Grandfather (Charles Salem Wilson) had already died. The genealogy notes give no dates for him. Una was born in 1881, though, and appears to have died in 1964. How interesting that, being born in Hayward, raised in Pleasant Hill, educated in Santa Barbara and Chicago, I should end up buying a house 2.7 miles from my Great Grandparent's home.

Update:
In the envelope, unattached, I found a letter from Great Grandma Elise, written the day before. It's full of hope for the new baby, tales of common friends, and the great fear about the war. It is much more what I would have expected. I'm considering starting a genealogy project. Nothing major, but I want a way to digitally organize this information. I may need to invest in a new scanner.