The Mayflowers

My husband comes from an elite lineage. On his mother’s side, they can trace their people back to the revolutionary war. There are oil moguls, war heroes, railroad industry leaders, and impressive ranchers. He even had a maternal aunt who invented the floating mattress, aka the water float. She fell to her death in Galveston, sometime after WWII. Coincidentally, J.C. Penney began selling floating mattresses that same year. My conspiracy theory hackles are up and active. My husband promises another random factoid that swims about his head at night is true. He regularly spits out tidbits of info about a war hero from his family known as the Swamp Fox. Neither his mother nor his aunt have been able to corroborate this information. I insist on misidentifying him as a swamp possum whenever I get the chance. Still, his ancestral stories are the things campfire dreams are made of. Mine, not so much.

My father’s side has some surprises, courtesy of Ancestry and distant cousins who committed decades to research. It seems that all Stilwells (there are both one middle “L” and two middle “L” versions - the former being the superior, of course) hail from a single immigrant in or around the mid 1800s – this according to the cousin brigade. The interwebs disagrees. See, there was a place in England, near Surrey, back before the numbers that represent years had 4 digits. Spring fed wells abound there and are said to never freeze. Some bubble. Some do not. If your land had wells that didn’t bubble, you were known as the dude with the still wells. Get it? These boomers had jokes. But, seriously, that’s how we know we’re all related. Surrey had some bussin’ wells that simply did not bubble.

One thing my paternal cousins all have in common is the impressive percentage of Scottish DNA we possess. Most of us have close to 40% as our makeup. Since my greatgrandmother’s maiden name was McGuffin, we’ll tip our hat to Alma Pearl McGuffin Stilwell on that one. I never met her. I was phase 2 of my father’s child groupings. My grandparents were much older when I came along. Alma died in 1949. She and husband Charlie Mimms were sharecroppers in Ellis County in a little town called Bristol. Their house was still standing the last time I drove through that area. It sits off the main road, just over the famous Bristol Bump. If you know, you know.

My mother’s family was mostly French on her father’s side. Before they immigrated, it was pronounced “Puh-KARD,” so very elegant and French. In Texas, the syllables morphed into “PICKerd,” so very harsh and uncouth. On her mother’s side, her family was mostly religious folks from Germany. The Heitts became the Hitts, one of Seagoville’s founding families. That is the Heinz 57 Reader’s Digest version of my heritage. Though my paternal cousins will never stop arguing the fact that one day our DNA will flip somehow and showcase an impressive amount of indigenous blood, that appears to be lore that simply isn’t true. We are a bunch of things, none of them so terribly impressive to the novice eye.

Of course, every good column has a slight twist. It’s time for me to give you mine. Imagine a rather bland lineage that just happened to have a sweet little story that spanned over 120 years. It’s a brief story. I don’t even know if I can zhuzh it up enough to make it interesting. It’s interesting to me, though, because of this moment in time and what it means to me. All my demons seem to materialize in the spring, after all.

Spring stinks. My daughter died in April of 2008. She had an undiagnosed congenital birth defect known as a Coarctation of the Aorta. Basically, her aorta was deformed. It kinked on one side much like a water hose will do when you try to pull it across the yard to water that one last rose bush. No one knew about her heart. Once we did, it turned out to be irreparable. The week after her death was Easter. Her birthday landed two weeks after that. Mother’s Day landed one week after that. My birthday landed one week after that. Then, around four weeks after we lost Chynna, I found a weird pebbly thing under my skin that turned out to be stage 3 breast cancer with lymph node involvement. I pray to never be humbled as I was in 20082009. Yet, out of this tragedy have blossomed some gorgeous flowers. This Saturday is May 3rd, her 34th birthday. But here’s the deal, it’s my grandson’s birthday, too. Are you ready for the sweet twisty story?

I’d like you to meet Ione Mae Hitt, born in Seagoville, Texas in 1901, number five of seven children of Eli and Elizabeth Valena (Lena). She had two younger sisters, Jewel and Lucille – the baby. Lucille was my grandmother and my very best friend. Ione was born on May 3rd and died in 1966 before I was born. I grew up hearing stories about my Aunt Ione. I know she was sweet, functioned as the caretaker of her two younger sisters (much to their dismay), & was a redhead. Most Hitts were. My grandmother doted on Ione’s sons after her death, especially her oldest, Jake. The stories of grandma’s trips to Sweetwater to stay with Jake and his wife Audrey are legendary. Time to tie this up with a bow.

Once upon a time, there was a woman born on May 3rd. Her name was Ione. She had a sister named Lucille, who had a daughter named Marsha, who had a daughter named Dina, who had a daughter named Chynna, who was also born on May 3rd. Chynna had a brother named Daniel, who named his own daughter Chynna. He also had a son named Ezra, who was born on May 3rd. Mayflowers abound. Swamp foxes do not. I love you. So does Jesus.