Family History

I finally had a chance to talk with my Dad about my family's history some tonight.  I told him I had read The Grapes of Wrath, and that led to a conversation about Steinbeck and then into about Dad's father and his family.   PeePaw, Dad's dad, grew up during the Great Depression in Oklahoma, and actually lived through the Dust Bowl there.  My great-grandmother raised eight children in Delhi.  Some of my questions got answered.  My family did not leave.  They found a way to survive.  I can't even imagine it.  Dad said PeePaw told stories about going out to get the sand off the cotton.  He said that PeePaw often talked about the difficulty of the work they did when he was growing up but that he never talked about his family going hungry.  I wish I knew more.  I wish I had been paying attention enough to have asked him about it myself before that opportunity was gone forever.

I also learned that my great-grandmother rode into the opening of Oklahoma in the back of a Conestoga wagon.  Dad said she was somewhere between 12 and 14 when the Oklahoma Land Rush happened.  Their first home was a sod house.  How did I not know these things?  There is so much history that I don't have.  It's amazing, like a lap full of jewels somebody has unexpectedly poured out for me.  I hope I can keep finding out more.  I also want to go and see these places more urgently than ever before to see where my family comes from and what forged them.