I’ve urged it before and I urge it again: Make it your resolution this year that you are going to sit down and talk with your parents and grandparents, to listen to their stories, ask them questions. You’ll not only find out more about who they are but more about who you are, and if you are as lucky as I was, learn a little about the disappearing art of storytelling.
I picked up on that idea as a kid who was fascinated by the stories my grandfather Frank Gallaugher used to tell. They were true stories — at least true to his memory — about our family and about the times, places, and circumstances that created our particular story.
As he began to age — he lived to nearly 100 and was lucid until the day he died — I realized he was the sole depository of a wealth of information not only about our family but the times and events of his lifetime. It’s hard to imagine the changes he saw; he remembered seeing the last of the Attakapas Indians as a boy and men land on the moon as an adult. During his lifetime he and his peers marveled over hundreds of things we take for granted — electricity, telephones, radio, television, airplanes, refrigerators, even everyday things like zippers, baseball gloves, ballpoint pens, toasters, and our indispensable duct tape.
That’s why I got out the tape recorder — this was in the days before video cameras were in every home — and interviewed him for several hours. It was one of the most satisfying, and sometimes surprising, things that I have done, and led me to sit down with my grandmother and mother and aunts and uncles to capture their lives and memories on tape.
Some of their stories were funny, some of them not so. You could feel the fear and worry in my grandmother’s recollections of the days during World War II when her boys were in faraway and dangerous places. They came home unhurt, but that didn’t change the worry she felt while they were gone.
Sometimes I got insights that I would have never had without these interviews. For example, I was very young when my grandfather Bradshaw died and I have no real recollection of him. I know that he came to Louisiana from England as a young man, met and married the Cajun girl Alzena Vincent, and ran the family farm near Vinton in Calcasieu Parish.
I’d assumed that he spoke with that same Texas accent as most of the people of the Calcasieu prairies, so it surprised me when my aunt told me, “You know, I think lots of people thought Poppa was smarter than he was, just because he had that British accent.”
Of course, he had a British accent! He was a grown man when he came to the United States. But I’d never thought of it, and that changed my idea of the man I knew only from a photo of a fellow with a handlebar mustache.
Those tapes were destroyed in a house fire some years ago, but I still remember most of the stories and am still influenced by them.
While you’re gathering memories, do one other thing: Find those family photos that are stuck away somewhere and identify who is in them and where and when they were taken. My grandmother kept shoeboxes full of old photos and such, but hardly any of them had any clue about why they were taken and who was in them. My mother and aunts and uncles recognized some of the people, but only some.
My grandfather Gallaugher was in his early 90s when I interviewed him, but was still as sharp as a tack. One of my first questions to him as we sat in the living room of the old family home on the Lake Charles lake bank was, “Have you lived here all your life?”
His quick answer: “Not yet.”
It was a good answer. He lived nearly another 10 years. My parents and aunts and uncles are also gone now. But before they left, they helped turn names in dry genealogical charts into real people who led full, remembered, and sometimes remarkable lives.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
