A little bit of Family Heritage

I've written before about my paternal grandmother, Dorothy Scott. She was born in Michigan in 1904 and died in California in the early 1990s. It was she who willed me the box with many old family photographs I've put up here. Looking among old papers I found a letter she wrote to me as a teenager with many old family details. As a child I felt fairly alienated from my extended family: my mother's parents were long gone and her brothers and their families all lived far from us. My father had been close with neither his own father nor his mother's extended family so we didn't really have frequent visits with relatives. I asked my gramma for some information on my roots, this would have been in the 1970s, and I was lucky enough to receive this letter with all sorts of genealogical details.

The first section was a bit about my father's family. Considering how badly my grandfather treated her I was surprised to read fairly objective facts, though key parts of the narrative ommitted some crucial details. I'll leave all that for a future post on my father's paternal lineage.

The rest of the letter is filled with facts and details. By way of offering up a bit more internet immortality to these long-gone ancestors here's a big portion of my grandmother Dorothy's letter:

"My mother, Eudora Kimble Scott, was the only child (she'd had a baby brother who died in infancy) of Alice Holmes Kimble and Ransom E. Kimble. The Holmes family (my great grand-parents were farmers near Vicksburg, Michigan. As a child I remember older people saying I resembled my great-grandmother whose name was Emily Holmes amd it was for her I named my kitty! Incidentally all the Holmes-Kimbles-Scotts seem to have been quite long-lived. Somewhere I have a photo of my sister Ruth as a baby being held by her (also my) mother surrounded by 6 grandmothers! Let's see these were Grandma Kimble, her mother Emily Holmes and Grandpa Kimble's mother ___ Kimble then Grandma Scott, plus her mother ____ Decker and grandpa Scott's mother ____ Scott.

"Grandpa Ransom Kimble's family were Pennsylvania Dutch who pushed westward and became Michigan farmers just south of the little town of Vicksburg where I grew up. They retired by the time my mother was high school age. They sold the farm, bought property and built their house in Vicksburg. They invested their farm sales money in property in Vicksburg: a couple of stores and houses which brought them income during the remainder of their long lives. Grandpa died in his 70s, Grandma Kimble at 80.

"They lived only 1 1/2 blocks from us as we (my 4 brothers 3 sisters and I) spent many happy hours, days, sometimes at their lake cottage, weeks with them. I remember sitting on my grandpa's lap in front of this big coal stove listening to his tales of their first years in Michigan when much of the country was still forest. He knew many Indians, even one Indian chief (Pottawattamies I think ) all friendly apparently and from whom he learned much lore. My mother Eudora (who was always called Dora and for whom I was named) was born July 19, 1872. She went to high school with my father...

"My paternal grandmother, Maria Decker Scott, was born in 1844 and died in 1932 in Vicksburg. I'm not sure where the Deckers came from, a fairly large family. They lived in Indiana...I once knew her brother Alf Decker who moved to Montana, also his sister Mina who we knew as children. (Emily keeps walking across my papers so the cat hairs are gratis!)

"My grandfather Scott's family came from Yorkshire, England. In fact he may have been born there. William Woodhead Scott b. 1844, died in Vicksburg Michigan in 1918. When he was a child they came west to Ontario, Indiana, where they established prosperous woollen mills. He had brothers and sisters, I think. Young William joined the Union Army during the civil war. He became a captain. (After the war he gathered a lot of regalia: uniforms, swords in sheaths, beaded epaulets and such which we children used to dress up with, swords and all, and parade up and down the block!)

"As his vocation he chose to be a dentist and came with his wife (Maria) and his son, my father Clinton, and his daughters, my Aunt Clara to Vicksburg, which was then just a 4 corners with few buildings to set up what became a very successful practice. They built quite a large house with 'elegant' furnishings and became important as the village grew. He helped (with his hands) to build a church -- congregational -- and my father and aunt helped haul stone for it with their team of spotted ponies. He was quite a student -- self taught -- used to give steriopticon lectures of the Holy Lands for church and civic groups... Always on Memorial Day he led the parade and delivered the address of the day at the cemetary while the hundreds of townspeople including all the town's children trudged along carrying our armloads of flowers to put on veteran's graves.



"My father, Clinton Robert Scott, b. 1870 d. 1937...decided to be a dentist like his father, so went to Ann Arbor was graduated a DDS...They lived first in Schoolcraft Michigan, then Marcellus, where I was born, and then in 1906 moved to Vicksburg where my father practiced for the rest of his life.

She lists her siblings Ruth, Florence, Robert, William W., Lynn, Rollo and Frances. "... Interesting enough (and disappointing to my father) it was his four girls who sought and self-financed college educations. Dad would have paid expenses for the boys (though how he would have done it, I don't know. We had a good home but no money) but the boys weren't so inclined."

Though I've been to Michigan many times I've never been to Vicksburg, or to St. Joseph where she lived with my grandfather Horst after their marriage. I hope the people who live in their houses in Vicksburg today, assuming they're still standing, are nice people. Anyway, I don't believe as the Mormons do that I need to convert my departed ancestors to my own religion, but I do believe in thanking them earnestly for the lives they lived, and the steps they made that allowed my own life to be.

(Calendar at top from the office of Clinton R. Scott, Dentist, Marcellus, Michigan; my great grandfather, showing my grandmother's older siblings Ruth, Robert and Flo; 1899. The caption under the photo reads, "Dr. Scott does all our dental work." Bottom photograph shows my grandmother in 1926, the year before she married my grandfather.)

Vrooooomm

I love this photo, but it's a mystery. It's from my Grandmother's box of family photos, but nothing is written on the back. I'm guessing late 1940s to 1950s; and the landscape suggests California. It's not a picture of my grandmother Dorothy, though the shape of the face is definitely Scott. Gramma Dorothy had a taste for fast cars: in the 1960s she drove across the country in her bright red Karmann Ghia. But I'm guessing this is Aunt Fran who seems to have led the relocation of the unmarried Scott sisters to California. I don't know what kind of car that is but it sure is cool. This coming from a lifelong non-driver. The rolling hills here look ripe for development; I wonder if this was indeed Marin county in a wilder time. Oh for a convertible, a dirt road, a driving scarf, and an empty, rolling landscape. Vrooom!

This photo enlarges nicely. Click on the photo to see it bigger.

Family Ghosts

My grandmother Dorothy Scott passed on in the early 1990s. While her last few years were spent in a demented Alzheimer's fog, she he had lived a good long life, born in southern Michigan and died after thirty years in Mill Valley, California. I belatedly inherited a box of family photos from her just a couple years ago, passed on to a friend and set aside for those many years before they finally got to me. It's an odd collection of photos; many of them older than any visual evidence of my family I'd ever seen before. They range from 19th-century tintypes through 1970s snapshots. Most of them are not labelled, and I have no idea who many of the people in these photos are; many are my ancestors, many lost distant cousins, many I have no idea whatsoever. I met several of my grandmother's sisters when I was a child so there is some familiarity: but she came from a very large family, even though the genes she passed down to my father seem not to have included that trait. There's a magic quality to these pictures, and yet also, something vaguely sad. Although I hope that other forks of the Scott and Kimble and Decker families have revered and remembered their ancestors better than mine has, it makes me melancholic to consider these faces and figures so full of life in these photos to be now so randomly anonymous.

The beautiful photo above shows my grandmother's older sisters Ruth and Flo Scott wading in Lake Michigan, probably with their father--my great grandfather--probably about 1900.


This one shows my grandmother's grandfather William Scott with his sister Clara Scott, his wife, nee Decker, and his mother in law "great grandmother Decker" and a cousin whose name I can't read, sitting around their dining room table in Michigan, Marcellus or Vicksburg; it's not dated but it's probably the 1880s or 1890s. He's the hero of the family who served in the Union Army.


This is the Kimble house in Vicksburg, Michigan, undated but probably from the 1870s. These are the Kimble women; the child is my grandmother's mother Eudora Kimble, later Scott. It's Dora's mother, grandmother and great grandmother in the photo with her. This one really needs to be seen larger; click on it to see these people in better detail.

I feel like I owe these people some immortality, especially since I'm not passing on my genepool to anybody. It seems impossible but without all of them I wouldn't be here; and these are only a handful of my ancestors, the ones from my father's mother's line. They're like ghosts now, long gone to their rest, but they're also, well, still here, peering out from these photos.

Welcome, ancestors, to the internet.

Nostalgia

A friend has accused me of being too nostalgic lately. Looking for art to scan for this blog I ran across this idyllic photo of me romping in the surf with my grandma in California in the mid-1960s. So I guess I must plead guilty!

Grandma was Dorothy Scott Horst Holden; she was married to my grandfather for only a few years in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and then remarried in the 1980s. She passed on in the early 1990s.

Echoes of a past life: Finding My Way

It's just after the winter solstice, the time in the northern hemisphere when the night is the longest and the day the shortest. It's a visceral milestone of time, and somehow has magically come to coincide with a number of religious festivals (Christmas, Channukah, etc.) that disavow their cosmic timing but are nevertheless festivals of preserving light and warmth in the dark time. The Solstice was a key part of my spiritual journey, and I found an article that explains some of how it made an impact on what I have come to believe.

One of the stories not related here is that when my grandmother saw the name I had put on the back of the Solstice cards I was designing, she was horrified. I was trying to unify the different strands of my life and used a combination of my leftist-era "party" name pseudonym and my birth name: in the process I dropped my middle name which was her family name. She was rightfully offended; and I deserved the scolding. Shortly thereafter I jettisoned the leftist pseudonym completely and not only restored her family name to mine as a tribute to her, but decided I would always use my full three names. (Forgive me, gramma, for "ish" but it's the internet's fault.) The picture above does not include my grandmother, key to the story below, but is instead several generations of women from the Scott and Kimble/Kimball lines; I think the young woman in the center is her mother and the baby her older sister Ruth; it was taken in Michigan in the 1890s.

Forgive my complicated proto-feminist linguistic tics here: I was developing a critique of Neo-Paganism as gender-obsessed and exclusionarily heterosexist. I tended to add "/ess" to any possibly gender-assigned pronoun as an act of subversion. I came, in the end, to reject Neo-Paganism's God/Goddess dualism as hopelessly profane (and inane) in the face of God's awesome unity, transcending such trivialities as gender.

This essay is in fact a bit of a polemic against mainstream Wicca with its questionably orthodox myths and pastoral pretenses. It's worth noting that a bit more than two years after it was published I had left Neo-Paganism behind and been initiated into Santeria. I love cosmic curveballs.

_____

Finding My Way
by Ian Scott Horst
from "Coming Out Pagan," Spring 1994, Vol. 2 No. 1, published out of Bethesda, Maryland.

When my grandmother received one of my winter Solstice cards eight or nine years ago, she asked me what I meant. I explained to her how I didn't find any meaning in Christmas, but that I wanted to celebrate something at that time of year along with everybody else and wanted to send out cards to keep in touch with friends and relatives. The Solstice, I said, seemed to me a miraculous and obvious natural occurrence, not something that one needed to "believe" in and was therefore eminently deserving of celebration.

I was using the word "Pagan" then, even though I hadn't really figured out what it meant or what it meant for my future. Over the next couple of years, I came to explore the meaning of the concept of Paganism. At the same time, before her mind began to desert her, she came to confide in me how she had come to many of the same conclusions I had about religion and nature and the like. She was thinking of herself, in a way, as a Pagan, too.

I remembered how on my childhood visits to her home in California, she had shared with me her love of nature, taking me on walks through the woods and to the shore. And I remembered how I had eventually discovered her probable bisexuality and the definite lesbianism of her sister and next-door neighbor. And together, all these things made me feel close to her, and thankful toward her, despite our small presence in each others' day-to-day lives.

I like to think that my grandmother had much to do with who I am today and with my spiritual consciousness as a Gay Pagan priest/ess, and there is much truth in this statement. And how easy it would be to claim the illusory mantle of heredity, and how near the truth to say that my grandmother was a Witch and taught me her secret ways. But she was just a regular person living a regular -- if extraordinary -- life, passing on love and life's lessons to a young grandson she saw for only a few moments of her full life. Her herb garden was for ground cover and for cooking. Her knowledge of "secret ways" was no more nor less than those all of us regular people discover in the process of playing out the marvelous gifts of air, fire, water, earth and spirit.

The truth is that I am the first of my line (well, at least to my knowledge, say for a thousand years or so) to stand in a circle and call the God/dess by Her name(s). The fact that I have had to find my own way to Paganism undermines its practicable and fulfilling nature not one bit. For if most of the practices of my path are products of my, my friends', and my teachers' imaginations, they are most certainly not figments of our imaginations. The God/desses and spirits who guide us, talk to us, challenge us, teach us, summon us, protect us, listen to us, and bless us are as real and unmetaphorical as the wood of my desk, the purr of the furry cat sitting next to me, and the chill of the winter world outside my window.

After sending out my Pagan Solstice cards for five years or so, I decided that if I was going to call myself a Pagan, I ought to find out what that meant. That was the beginning of an odyssey which has lead me today to being co-Priest/ess of a coven, co-founder of New York City's Queer Pagans which averages forty people at each ritual, editor of a newsletter read by hundreds, and the proprietor of a small graphic design business named after the God/dess.

At first, I read a lot. And went for lots of walks in the park. I have to say that the walks in the park were of more use, ultimately, than most of the books I read. I learned that the winds would come if I talked to them and meant it, whether I called them watchtowers, guardians, spirits, powers, or whatever. The important part was the act of meaning it. I learned that if the books described a ritual situation which to me seemed a violation of my Queer heart, I should follow my heart and not the words on the printed page.

And I learned that if I felt isolated as a gay male Pagan among straight Pagans, I should find other Queer Pagans. And I learned that if most Queer Pagans I met were trapped in a cyccle of powerlessness, victimization, and complaint, or by a narrow view of gayness as just the sexual, I should simply manifest my vision and create a kind of Queer Pagan community I would feel comfortable in. This path has been rewarding beyond belief. I did not learn all these things by myself, and I am indebted to the teachers, Queer or straight, human or divine, who showed me something important and who framed an experience, a lesson, a gift.

Of course the unorthodox and eclectic carries with it many responsibilities. It is not a license to disregard advice or the power of the God/dess. It is, however, an opportunity to experience the real world that is really around you, around me. It means listening to the land we live on: land with no country; and a past not only older than we can imagine but older than the act of imagining itself. It means listening to the memories, voices, and rhythms carried here in the dreams of immigrants and nightmares of slaves. It means singing the chords created by the communities that are our cities. It means dancing to the beat of our experiences as Queer people. It means sacrifices and offerings, commitments and revelations, and rewards. It means standing on the dizzy precipice of now.

My way is to trust my heart, my mind, my spirit, my body. For in these places, the God/dess herself touches me, speaks to me, and opens a path before me, helping me to find my way.

May each of you find yours.

My Great Great Grandfather

I've written elsewhere about the journey of my father's father's family from Russia to the United States. Here's a little bit about my father's mother's family. It's the most "American" branch of the family: unlike the immigrant Volga-Germans, German-Germans, Irish, and secret Jews comprising the rest of my ancestors, the Scott wing seems to have come to these shores before there was an actual United States. I was recently sent a box of old photos from my grandmother's estate--she's been gone a long time but these were floating around somewhere--and included is this amazing photo of my great great grandfather William W. Scott, of Vicksburg, Michigan. He's shown in his Union Army uniform in 1865. I don't have a lot of documentation of any of my family roots, but I know at least that William Scott was born in Indiana in 1844, and died in 1918. He was married to Maria Decker, and among his children was my grandmother Dorothy's father, Clinton R. Scott, a dentist in Marcellus, Michigan (who married Dora Kimble--sometimes spelled Kimball), born in 1868.

It's amazing to see this young man of 20 or 21, just before starting his family, perhaps on discharge from service in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Here's another photo, undated, but apparently in some sort of parade in the 1910s. On the back is pencilled in "Dr. W. W. Scott".

The Scotts had lots of children. I'm sure my distant cousins are legion. I don't know when they settled in that part of Michigan: but my father was born there and my grandmother didn't leave there until the 1950s. My grandmother herself was one of many siblings: I met her oldest sister Ruth once, the beloved daughter of the family who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a nursing home in California. The photos of the Scott children in the early 1900s show pampered middle-class children in tree-lined small town idle. My great aunt Frances Scott, gramma's sister, was a photographer--and more-or-less out lesbian--in Mill Valley, California from the 1950s through her passing in the 1980s. It makes me wonder, given this family blessing, what it would have been like to be gay in William W. Scott's generation: was it always a suppressed and hidden inner struggle, or were there blue-coated brothers in some former secret army of lovers?