Final Web December 2015 Web

Northeast North Carolina Family History - “O Tannenbaum…”
By: Irene Hampton - nencfamilyhistory@gmail.com
One of my favorite Christmas memories is shopping for a Christmas tree. The fir trees were stored in the local Boy Scout/Girl Guide building where the heat
was turned off. Not a big issue in the south, but in the Canadian Rockies it was about as cold in the building as it was outside. As a family we would go to
pick out a tree and walk up and down the racks guessing what each tree would look like. Why guessing? Because the limbs were all frozen together!
After choosing the one we all agreed had the most potential, we would load the frozen specimen into our trunk, get it home and set it up and wait. As the
limbs thawed, they would fall into the shape we had to work with. My mom, always the industrious former farm girl, would trim the lower limbs and drill
holes where gaps were evident, filling them with the aforementioned trimmed limbs.
My husband and I have had a few tree adventures of our own. One year we decided to go to a tree farm and cut a fresh one, which was a wonderful family
activity. Once we got home we set up our tree and commenced decorating it. All was well until the warmer conditions in our home woke up the hibernating
insects… Another year we got artsy and cut a deciduous tree, wrapped it in cotton and then decorated it. Not quite the magazine version, but my husband
liked it enough that he still talks about it. The smell of a fir tree reminds me of the forests back home, so for the time being we are still putting up a cut tree
– now if I could find a way to move a mountain within viewing distance…
Not all memories of the holiday season are happy and for some this time of year accentuates a time of loss. For many years I fell in that category. On the sixth
of December 1985, my father died one day before his eighty-first birthday. Most people were well into the holiday spirit and explaining why we were traveling
in normally cheery circumstances was hard. I accompanied my mother as she returned gifts she had bought for my father and the reason for the return always
being asked, necessitated explaining that the person for whom they had been intended had died. It was many years before that feeling of sorrow didn’t cast a
shadow over my Christmas celebration. This December marks thirty years since my father’s unexpected death. The years have softened the heartache and I
cherish my memories.
My father married and had children late in life. He was a very reserved man, “kept himself to himself.” I really know very little about his life. When I went
home for his funeral I tape recorded my mother’s memories of him as well as her remembrances growing up on the Canadian prairies during the dirty thirties as
the oldest of 11 children. I deeply regret it took my father’s death to spur me to ask detailed
questions about my family, many answers I will never know. This leads me to revisit a point I made
in my first column.
I quoted a New York Times article “The Stories That Bind Us” in which two psychologists concluded
after a battery of tests that the more children know about their family history the stronger the sense
of control they have over their lives. They also concluded they had higher self-esteem and functioned
more successfully in their family. If you didn’t gather together for Thanksgiving, please make a point
in whatever your family gathering is this season, to discuss, record, preserve and pass on what it is
that has made your family who you are. Give the gift of sharing over the dinner table what you know
about your ancestors, stories about your own childhood and do it often. If there is one thing I would
not want to share with anyone it is the thirty years of wishing I had done differently.
Irene Hampton earned a Certificate in Genealogy from Brigham
Young University and worked as the Genealogical/Local history
Researcher for the Pasquotank-Camden Library for over 12 years.
She has also abstracted and published “Widow’s Years Provisions,
1881-1899, Pasquotank County, North Carolina”; “1840 Currituck,
North Carolina Federal Census” and “Record of Marriages, Book A
(1851-1867) Currituck County, North Carolina”.
You may contact her at nencfamilyhistory@gmail.com.
26 Albemarle Tradewinds December 2015 albemarletradewinds.com