Adding Flesh to Family Skeletons

This article isn't about Carcassonne, other than it has provided me a grey, intemperate day to stay inside scouring obituaries and census records in search of my ancestors.

I am determined to write my grandmother's story and it is proving a formidable task.  But today, I got to piece together a little of HER family.  She never shared any information about them or her childhood with me.  I seem to remember something about 11 children, but I was so young, I can't remember if she meant her generation or her mother's family.  

As it turned out, today brought a moment of recognition.  I found, online, a photo of a woman whose likeness was included in our own sparse family album.  Nobody knew who this little woman was, and all I knew what that she didn't look like someone easily amused.  I sure didn't want to be the one to cross her.

As it turns out, the photo is of my grandmother's grandmother, Julia Elizabeth Bayles Harding and her daughter, Great-great Aunt Lillian.  Great-great grandmother Julia actually raised my grandmother, Hazel, from infancy to about the age of 11 or 12.  No wonder Grandma Hazel had a soft spot (and believe me, she had very few soft spots) for her own grandmother.  

In laying out a timeline for Julia and her family, I realized that she had her first child in 1857, and her youngest of 11 was born in 1884.  That means Julia was pregnant for--27 years!!!  It begged the question--what kind of a sibling relationship did Herbert, her oldest, have with his youngest brother.  Herbert himself had children who were older than little brother Joseph.  What kind of family dynamics were there in the Harding household over the course of three decades?  

Trying to place their movements and whereabouts from 1870 through 1920 has been frustrating and fascinating.  I learned that Grandma Hazel's youngest uncle, Joseph, died in 1966.  I was old enough by then to understand history and what my elders had to share with me.  Why did I never even know of his existence?

We, my sisters and I, come from a family that keeps secrets, big secrets, close to their breastbone.  Poking around old records is raising more questions than it is answering, but I am determined to add flesh to the bones of these long-dead ancestors.