All My Ancestors

OK, so we’ve got the Carnival of Genealogy and now we have a Genealogy Parade. Bill West has challenged us to enter a band or a float. Since it’s a virtual project and I really don’t have to stuff kleenexes through chicken wire (trust me, I’ve worked on my share of actual floats!), I’m entering a float.

When I was growing up, I was part of the school band that marched every year in the annual celebration parade in August. This was at the top of the Texas panhandle, and it was HOT!! The only uniforms our band had were wool, but we were at least exempted from wearing the heavy jacket–we could wear a white shirt. The main street is part of state highway 83, and it is long. It was always a big deal. Imagine my chagrin when after college, I heard the husband of another hometown girl describe the parade as the “tractor parade.”

However, he was probably right. I only knew my little part of the parade, and we were having a great time. But being an agricultural area, there were lots of tractors–the implement dealerships used the occasion to showcase their new products and lots of the floats were also pulled by tractors.

So all that to say, my float has to have a tractor, and it also has to have wheat. The area where I grew up now raises other crops–maize, or milo, and soybeans. But in the 50s and 60s, most of the crops were wheat. And I also descend from the Germans from Russia who brought turkey red wheat to the Great Plains. So there’s gotta be wheat.

The music has to be old-fashioned country-western. One of my uncles played in a western-swing band–maybe we’ll use his recording as part of the music But Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and Ray Price and Skeeter Davis are the people who are singing when I think of my family history. I also have relatives who are accomplished musicians in other genres, an organist who also installs and re-builds organs, for example, but I think the country-western respresents the most people.

That about covers it.

My only non-rural, non-Southern family originated in New York City. But even the descendants of that family ended up in Arkansas–he was a physician, but he also was a founding member of the Agricultural Society in Warren County, Iowa. So we have wheat and country music and a tractor. Not all that exciting but very representative. I suppose I could try to put in some fire and hail to liven things up–we did lose a wheat field and a truck one year to a fire and it was always touch and go as to whether we would be “hailed out.”

I’ll have to work on the weather issue. It might liven things up a bit.