Saturday, April 13, 2019

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Tell Us About One of Your Grandparents

It's Saturday Night, 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!


For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), answer the question:


1)  Memories of the ancestors we knew and loved need to be told to the younger generations.  

2)  Tell us about your memories of a grandparent that you knew and loved.  If they all died before you knew them, tell us about a parent or a favorite aunt or uncle.3)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.

Here's mine:


I knew my maternal grandparents very well, and they were major influences on me for over 20 years.  My paternal grandparents lived in Massachusetts - my Seaver grandparent died before I was born, and I met my paternal grandmother once when she visited here in San Diego.  


I'm going to write about my grandmother, Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977).

Emily was born in Chicago on 19 August 1899 to Charles and Georgianna (Kemp) Auble.  They moved to San Diego in about 1911, and lived at 767 F Street near downtown San Diego.  Emily attended San Diego High School, but dropped out to work after her father died in March 1916 after falling down the stairs in their home.  Her mother lived until 1952, and was called "Nana" by my mother.  She lived with Emily the rest of her life.


After her marriage to Lyle Carringer in 1918 in San Diego, Emily was a housewife and mother to my mother, and only child.  She loved gardening and flower arranging. She was a member of the San Diego Floral Association and the Flower Guild Arrangers of San Diego. She entered many floral arrangement competitions and was a master judge of flower arrangements for the National Council of State Gardens Club. She was also a member of the Point Loma Assembly and Ikebana International. 

She was a prim, proper, happy, optimistic, loving, warm and gentle person who enjoyed being with friends and family.  I doubt that she ever uttered a curse word, and was very disappointed when someone else did.  I know...she told me!  She was religious, but never went to church (my grandfather was agnostic, and my mother was also).

Emily suffered a stroke in the 1960's but seemed to recover quickly, and lost quite a bit of weight. She suffered from dementia in the 1970's, and died following a stroke at home on 19 June 1977, and is inurned at Cypress View Mausoleum (Bronze Corridor, Niche 60) in San Diego, CA.

I have so many wonderful memories of, and deep feelings about, this Very Important Person in my life. They include:

* She took care of me daily during World War II (1944 to early 1946) when my father was in the U.S. Navy and my mother was teaching school. She was probably the one who saw my first step, gave me baths, opened my world to reading, and heard my first words. I always felt very close to her, more so than my two brothers did, for this reason.  

* When I was a young boy, Lyle and Emily lived downstairs from us, and I often visited them, went to the Piggly Wiggly store two blocks away with her, and loved playing in her fenced-in gardens by her house. She was the one who supervised our berry picking and lemonade selling ventures.

* When Lyle (Gramp) and Emily (Gram) moved to Point Loma in 1951, their home became our second home. My brothers and I have fond memories of many Christmas Eves spent bedded down in the spare bedroom, singing Christmas carols, and falling asleep before Santa Claus came. We always went to their house on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks over San Diego Bay.

* She always was interested in my life, and encouraged me to do well in school, to learn about San Diego, and to play fair and do my best. My youth years were not wonderful from a peer standpoint because I was small, wore glasses and was not adept in sports or mechanical things. She was sort of my "secret friend" I could talk to about things.

*  When Linda and I married in 1970, they hosted the family bridal shower and the pre-wedding dinner in their home, and it was a beautiful place.  

* After our marriage, we didn't visit Lyle and Emily as much as before. There were the holiday events, but we were just "too busy" to visit more than occasionally. 

*  When Lyle died in November 1976, we started taking my mother over to the house to help Emily with basic things (my father often refused to go because she would berate him - the dementia) and to check on her. We usually made an outing of it - taking the girls to see their grandmother and great-grandmother. Emily doted on our two little ones, and served us Squirt! and cookies every time - Lori (born in 1974) thought it was great, but Tami was still a baby (born in 1976). It was good for Emily to look forward to these visits, but I feel guilty that we didn't go often enough.  

*  It was on one of these visits that we found her on the floor, near death, after a stroke. The sight is seared in my memory - it was so hard to see this lovely woman in that way. My eyes still tear up over the memory. She died that night in the hospital.

Other than my wife and mother, Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer was the person I loved the most throughout the first 33 years of my life. 

I so appreciate the legacy that she left me - especially the memories of a life well lived and the wonderfully diverse heritage - mainly colonial 17th century English in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, colonial 18th century German immigrants to New Jersey, a small colonial Dutch line in New York and a mystery French Canadian line. Thank you, Gram, for making my life so good and my genealogy work so interesting!


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Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

Here is my post about my Nana.

https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2019/04/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-tell-us.html

Linda Stufflebean said...

I actually did the opposite and wrote about the one grandparent long gone before I was around: https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2019/04/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-32/

Nancy Ward Remling said...

I did it different too. I wrote about an uncle.

https://remlinggenealogy.blogspot.com/2019/04/saturday-fun-challenge-relatives.html