Working for the Kenan Family

433 Locust Street. Photos from Art family archives.

There is a place in my home town called the Kenan Center. In my childhood it was where craft shows and indoor hockey and graduations were held. The land it sits on was offered to the First Prebyterian Church by William Rand Kenan, Jr, a wealthy philanthropist in town. The original house still sits on the grounds, which Kenan owned from 1912-1965. I took pictures before my senior prom inside it and in it's gardens. 

The house was originally known as "The Hill."

In doing my genealogy I discovered that my 2x great-grandparents George Art & Katherine Pils Art worked for Mr. and Mrs. Kenan. My grandmother was a housekeeper and then cook and my grandfather was a chauffeur and then gardener. For a look at the interior and exterior of the house, which has been beautifully maintained, follow this link. 

Kenan wrote extensive memoirs in which he says, "I converted two closets between the two front bedrooms into a grand bath and put in a bath for the servants, also running water in two servant's rooms and modernized all the bathrooms." I liked discovering he thought about the servants' comforts. 

On the website for the House, Natalie Pitzer writes about Kenan, "Educated at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he participated in the discovery of calcium carbide which is the basis for the manufacture of acetylene. Upon graduation from the university, he came to Niagara Falls to build and help operate a calcium carbide plant for the Carbide M manufacturing Company, later known as Union Carbide." His brother-in-law Henry Flagler was the partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil Company. Flagler and Kenan developed railroad enterprises in Florida.

Pitzer also writes, "At the time of his death, [Kenan] was chairman of the Flagler system, which still operates hotels, resorts, land companies and the P & O Steamship lines. Locally, he was the owner and board chairman of the Western Block Company. At the age of 85, he was described as the only millionaire to go to work at 7:00 a.m. (Reputedly, this was a little hard on the help because they were expected to be there as well.)"

He was very generous to my hometown and left a legacy of philanthropy in large and small ways. I like to imagine he was a good man to work for. But enough about him. Let's see what he said about my ancestors! Because he wrote about them in his memoirs. And thanks to the interwebs I was able to read through them on-line. What a treasure!

From the memoir Incidents along the Way: More recollections Vol 3 by William Rand Kenan, Jr. (1872-1965).

In the section titled Chauffeurs Who Have Been Employed By Me, Kenan writes,“After my marriage in April 1904 I found it necessary on some occasions that I have a chauffeur to take Mrs. Kenan and at that time I secured the services of George Art. He was coachman for Mr. & Mrs. Eugene Ashley, who had fine horses, and he wished to get some experience in operating a motor car. The Ashleys were our next-door neighbors and friends of both of us. At that time I had a Peerless touring car of 1904 model.”

This explained to me why there was a photo of the house of the lawyer E. M. Ashley in the Art photo album. According to my notes George was a chauffeur with the family until 1908 when he became a gardener. At some point before his death he became and remained Head Groundskeeper.

In the section My Experience with Gardeners, Kenan writes, “George Art followed Thomas Garret. While not a trained gardener, his work was most satisfactory. His wife was our cook and both lived in the house. Art died on the place during 1937 and his wife continued with us as cook until she had to give up on account of her health and died during the Spring of 1941.”

There is a story about how attached George was to the Kenan dogs he cared for that they keened loudly in the yard outside the Arts' lodgings while he died. True or not it tells me there was a close relationship between my great-great-grandparents and their employers. 

The Arts took a lot of photos. Someone captioned half of them cheekily and the humor of the family is evident in what pictures remain- though I saved those photos for another time. It is an absolute joy to have a sense of them as a family unit. These are photos they took around the Kenan House. It is an honor to share their lives with all of you.

A horse and buggy in the back of the Kenan estate.

A carriage in front of the house. When I was little there was an old hitching post on the street along my walk to school.

Working as a chauffeur for the Kenans. Notice the man holding the cat?

George and one of the Kenan dogs.

Writing on the photo said Ginny Kenan (unknown) & Katherine (Pils) Art.

Labelled Connie Kenan. (Which may have been the dog's name.) 

Staff names are Alvina and Corine or Connie.

Staff.

These resemble candy striper uniforms to me. Possible staff nurses?

George Art. This photo was captioned Boss Man.

The kitchen staff (?). Katherine is second in from the right.

Katherine on the right.

Kenan grounds in winter.

George and Katherine Art in the 1930s.

My 1x great-grandfather Robert Art,my grandmother Patricia Art, and Katherine Art, my 2x great-grandmother.

The only photo not from the Art Family Archives. This is one of Polster's photos of old Lockport, showing the house by an entrance to the Kenan Center grounds.

Tracking the Arths from Germany

I know a lot of my genealogy. A lot. I can take a few branches back to Charlemagne, which I’m grateful for, whether or not there were errors made along the way, which happens. But when you have that many names, lines stretching back centuries, it humbles you with the vast number of people who were all integral to your standing where you are and breathing in the oxygen of this world.

That may be the truest reason why I do what I do.

I have spent my time in recovery on Ancestry, trying to push all the lines I have to their immigrant ancestor. I am hoping to, once I have a list I feel confident about, buy the International tier for a month and try to discover where in their countries these ancestors originated. But until then…

If you read my blog you know that my Grandma Pat passed away this year. I have been spending a lot of time on her family, maybe as a means of processing through our complicated relationship, but also as a means of deepening my connection to our shared ancestors. Her own mother died when she was eight and she didn’t know a lot about her family past her grandparents, the Arts, who worked as groundskeeper and housekeeper of the wealthiest family in my hometown, the Kenans.

             A few years ago I wrote down all of the Arts living in Pendleton who came from Germany, based on the family story I had been told. It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together but eventually I figured out the relations between the separate families and then hit the jackpot when I discovered through an early census that they lived on three separate plots, all next to each other. It validated my theory that they were relations who had likely come over and settled together.

             Then my mom told me, after speaking to her mother, that my Grandma always believed she was related to the Pendleton Arts. We didn’t have this conversation until after my Grandma passed. I wish I could have told her that they were all her cousins. But her story was more verification for my theory.

            The earliest census I found them on was 1855 where Adam Art is married to Catherine (uncertain) and is the Head of his own household, on a plot beside Wilhemina Wernersbach, living with her other two children Jacob Art and George Art. As Adam was only four years older than the boys in her house, I assumed that he was Wilhemina’s older son.

            I also found an arrival note from 1853 stating that Wilhemina Wernersbach came to America from Germany. But not with her children. Was the card incomplete?

            And where was her husband? Did he not come with them to America?

Ahhh?! Oh to go back in time and act as my own census taker. “Please, who were your mum and dad and what was her family name?”

And then… a few weeks ago I discovered a new hint on Ancestry that led to a second new hint that answered some of my questions. A hand-written card from 1836, stating a departure from Antwerp, Belgium. “Georg Arth, 35 and Wilhelmina Wernersbach, 37 and Adam, 7 and Jacob 3, and Georg, 3 mo.”

The family emigrated to America together. Proof!

That hint gave me a census for 1850 which lists Wilhemina Wernersbach and her children Adam, Jacob, and George, living in the household of Jacob and Martha Vandnspoch. Based on age, I am guessing he is her brother. Maybe a cousin, but she did name a child of hers, born in Germany, after him (feels like a safe assumption). So I say brother. And if you say both last names out loud, they are variants of the same name. In America, census takers often spelled them out phonetically.

            The census of 1850 does not list whether she is widowed or not. Not all census’ asked the pertinent questions that genealogists want to know. But perhaps Wilhemina’s return visit to Germany was related to the loss of her husband George. Or a parental loss. But it was one she undertook alone.

            It's a little thing, but I feel a step closer to her, to Wilhemina, and to the clan of Arths from Hesse-Darmstadt Germany.

Safe Journeys, Traveller

On April 11, 2018 I wrote My Grandma Pat is Dying which involved how I used my spiritual practice. Seven days later my mom messaged me to say that it wouldn’t be long. I lit my altar and called the waiting ancestors back in.

Parents of my grandmother

Margaret Burke & Robert Art.

*

Grandparents of my grandmother

Eliza Conners & Frank Burke.

Katherine Pils & George Art.

*

Great-grandparents of my grandmother

Mary Dowd & David Conners.

Thomas & Ellen Burke.

John Pils & Mary Smith.

Adam Art & Ana Catherine Blume.

*

Great-great-grandparents of my grandmother

Barney Dowd.

Betsey (uknown, married) Conners.

Ann (unknown, married) Burke.

I opened the way. I told her it was time. When she was ready she could let go.

But she wouldn’t. I was standing in front of my ancestor altar with one foot in this world and one foot in her limbo. I saw her, hanging on to an almost translucent thread. We were in motion, being pulled to the right. She stared at me, her left arm curled up around an empty space.

Bella.

Her cat.

I told her Bella would be fine. I promised we’d find her the right home.

Fuck. Those oaths you have to keep.

She relaxed. And she was gone. I was back in my room in front of my ancestor altar. I bent down to check my messages and as I watched, in Ethernet real time, my mom let me know her mother was gone.

I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

I was sad but wasn’t grief. I didn’t know her well enough for it to be sorrow. But it was sadness. Sad for my mother. Sad for the day I will lose my mother that I know will come. Sad for the years of getting to know the woman-my-grandma-had-become I won’t get. Because she changed at the end. I was sad  for the relationship I won’t get to have with her. The sadness was real. Just greater than I expected.

I didn’t cry again.

*

A few weeks later I attended an outdoor gathering where I went to a Grief Ritual. I didn’t necessarily feel like I was grieving but every cell of my body felt this pull to go. I felt I needed to go. So I did.

I was given a moment to speak to her one last time. And I did. I let two things be true. I wish she’d been able to make different choices. And I loved her. I almost qualified that with ‘anyway’ but I took a breath and held that word in.

She was one of my grandmothers. I knew of her growing up if I didn’t know her. She was Christmas Eve after-dinner and before-santa. There is a part of my heart that the shadow of her lives in. I have always carried her with me, imperfections and all. And I feel her loss.

*

In her last incarnation she adopted a cat and made friends with a local deer and their family. They would come to her ground level window and look for her. She would cut up apples and take them outside. The deer would let her walk among their young to set the apples on the ground. I wonder if they know what happened to her. I wonder if they understand what an empty apartment means.

I wonder who’s feeding them now.

The last time I saw her she gave me a book she said was too complicated for her—there were more than five characters and she couldn’t keep them straight. It’s not bad. I started reading it again when she got sick as a means of connecting in to her energy, to her heartbeat. I stopped reading when she died. It’s the last thing she ever gave me in a life where she didn’t give me many things… although she did give me a lot of my Nancy Drew Mysteries. I forgot about that until I was writing this. That’s something, too. They meant everything to me.

But I stopped reading. I put a bookmark in between the pages. It’s the last thing she will ever give me.

I’ll sit with that and set the book aside for now.

*

At the end of the gathering I was standing in the outdoor Ancestor Shrine and a friend was leading us through a meditation to connect with an ancestor. I opened myself to whoever wished to come through.

I almost audibly gasped.

For a moment I got a picture in my head. It’s almost always a similar one when I see him. Some forest glade, thick old trees and part of a rustic wooden fence. Mop of thick hair. Tall. Smiling. This was my German Guy. I realized in that second that he came to me through my Grandma’s family line. I also, instantaneously, felt the reassurance that she had crossed over.

Something like ‘we got her.’ But in German.

Hail to the Ancestors. 

Safe journeys, Traveller.

Bye Grandma.

My Mother's Irish Ancestors

The birds are singing their spring songs outside and St. Patrick's Day marks the turning to the equinox. The days are lengthening and in my little garden, the tiger lilies are peeking out of the earth with bright green shoots. I am thinking about my Irish heritage. I was surprised to discover today that all of my known Irish ancestors are buried beneath my mother's family tree.

The first to step on American soil was my 7x great-grandfather David Calhoun, born in Dongeal in 1690. He settled and died in Connecticut. I feel I have to admit that David's grandfather was from Scotland, so his family blood was Scotch-Irish.

Thomas Riddle, also found spelled Ridel, was born in Ireland in 1739. He was my 6x great-grandfather. He hailed from Tyrone County, where he appears on a 1796 list for Irish flax growers. He fought for the colonies in the Revolutionary War as a Private in 1775.

My 6x great-grandparents John Berry, born in 1762, and Nancy Matchet, born in 1767, came to America from Ireland and settled in a small town called Mayfield, in New York. There are still Berrys in Mayfield.

My other Irish ancestors all immigrated to New York, where the Erie Canal was being planned. The unknown parents of my 3x great-grandfather Thomas Burke came to America via Canada, where Thomas was born in 1832. He is listed as living in Lockport in 1855 with his widowed mother Ann. He was employed in "boating."

My 4x great-grandfather Barney Dowd came over from Ireland with his daughters and their families, including my 3x great-grandmother Mary Dowd, born about 1837 in Ireland, as was her husband, David Conners, my ancestor, too.

My Lockportian ancestors all lived in the areas of Lowertown where the Irish who worked on the canal had set up their homes. So in honor of St. Patty's day, I'll set out a bowl of warm honey and milk over bread, and I'll pour a pint of ale for those who left their homelands for a country where they were treated like vermin, but where they persevered and planted roots.

Putting My Ancestors on Milk Cartons

I’ve been pretty lucky in my quest to flesh out my family tree. Last count I was at over 1700 names and I know I have more than that now. Considering my post from last week, that’s not a lot compared to how many I could have, but it’s still more than most. And yet, even I get stuck in my genealogical search. I hit walls I can’t get through and I move on to something else. Often a new document will come up later on and I discover answers that I thought were lost forever- for three of my four family lines.

My maternal grandma’s recent generations were largely immigrants from Germany and Ireland. They helped build the Erie Canal, farmed in Pendleton, and settled in Lockport, NY. Many of them even lived in the neighborhood I grew up in, though I didn’t know that then.

Usually my luck has come from finding someone else, from a closely related branch, who has also done research or knows family stories I haven’t heard. As far as this branch goes, there don’t seem to be too many close relations. I wish I could put all of their names on the sides of milk cartons with a tagline that says Are You My Relative?

For now, my blog will have to serve me instead, with the hope that someone will type a name into a search, and at the bottom of the page will be this post, and maybe they’ll send me an e-mail. If you share an ancestor with me, please do- I love hearing from fellow cousins!

1x Great-Grandparents:

Robert George Art. Born 1892 SEP 13, Beach Ridge, NY. Died 1974 JUL, Olcott, NY.

Margaret Loretta Burke. Born 1899 JAN 1, NY. Died 1938 MAY 28, Lockport, NY.

They were married 1913 JUL 14, NY.

2x Great-Grandparents:

George Art. Born 1870 MAY 30, NY. Died 1943, NY.

K/Catherine S. Pils. Born 1871 MAY 29, Beach Ridge NY. Died 1946, NY.

They were married 1890. Art may be Artz. Pils may be Piehl.

Children & Birth Year: Robert J 1893, Walter G 1894, Alice E 1899.

Frank Burke. Born 1863 JUL, NY. Died after 1920.

Eliza Conners. Born 1866 DEC, NY. Died after 1910, possibly before 1920.

They were married 1884.

Children & Birth Year: Mary Ellen 1885, Thomas E 1887, Elizabeth F 1890, Lizzie 1891, Margaret Loretta 1892, Irene 1894, David E 1895, Catherine 1897, Anna G 1899, Frank, Jr. 1901, Harriet Z 1904, William 1905.

3x Great-Grandparents:

Adam Art. Born 1836, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany. Died 1896, NY.

Katherine Maria Schmeelk. Born 1834, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany. Died 1901, NY.

They immigrated, already married, 1848. Art may be Artz. Schmeelk may be Schmelz, Schmelzer. May also have been Maria Katerina- common in Germany at this time.

Children & Birth Year: John 1862, Francis 1865, Lena 1866, Catherine 1867, Jacob 1869, George 1870.

John F. Pils. Born 1827 AUG, Germany. Died 1911 OCT 31, NY.

Mary Burzee. Information unknown.

John F. Pils immigrated in 1855.

Children & Birth Year: Henry 1860, Mary 1863, John M 1868, Katherine 1871.

Thomas Burke. Born 1834, NY. Died after 1880.

Ellen. Born 1836, NY. Died after 1880.

Married approximately 1850.

Children & Birth Year: William 1860, Frank 1863.

David Conners. Born 1829, Ireland. Died after 1903, NY.

Mary D. Dowd. Born 1834, Ireland. Died after 1903, NY.

Children & Birth Year: Mary Ann 1857, Margaret 1860, Ellen 1861, Eliza 1866, Nora 1870.

4x Great-Grandparents:

[POSSIBLE] Herman Marcus Schmeelk/Schmelk/Scheelk. Born 1750, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany. Died 1835 Aug 21, unknown.

[POSSIBLE] Catherine Piper. Information unknown.

[possible] Children & Birth Year: Katherine Maria 1834.

Barney Dowd. Born approximately 1810, Ireland. Died after 1870, NY.

Children & Birth Year: Mary 1834.

May your stories find their way to me.

May your lives be remembered.

May your spirits be at peace.

On the Beach in Olcott

Hattie Eva Dutcher, married Smith, 1857-1882

Last year, my father showed me two recent family acquisitions, paintings on wood done by my Great-Great-Grandma Hattie Eva Dutcher, born in 1857. She later lived in Olcott NY, a small hamlet on the shore of Lake Ontario, where my Great-Grandma was born. The small wood board paintings were both of the shoreline at Olcott.

Between 1870 and 1877, two piers, extending out into the water 1800 feet, were built at Olcott, with a small lighthouse going up on the West pier. This village harbor held the deepest point of entry for boats. My 2x Great-Grandma would have watched the small town grow, poised for boom. At this time, before the 1900s, getting to Olcott, a popular vacation retreat, meant taking a horse and buggy.

I’ve learned that Hattie Dutcher’s aunt, Miss Mary Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Dutcher, was a well-known and respected artist, who lived in the 1000 Islands. It’s not surprising that her niece would try her hand at the craft. The paintings I held, in my childhood home, were beautiful, full of color and wonder. I shouldn’t have been surprised- artistic talent, whether singing, painting, or carpentry, has been a through-line in uncovering my family genealogy.

My 2x Great-Grandma Hattie died when she was 25, a month after giving birth to my Great-Grandma, her daughter and namesake. She died of anemia, complications from childbirth.

I wasn’t aware in my childhood, when we spent our summers in Olcott, that my family had so much history there. I wasn’t aware that multiple members of my family, on both sides, had lived and summered there. For me, it was a place to play and swim, to walk out on the broken concrete piers with my hand carefully tucked into my mom or dad’s hand.

There was always plenty of green grass to play in. The air was full of the sound of surf and gulls. My lungs were filled with the smells of sand and seaweed. And oh, the glorious sunsets at dusk!

I sat at the water’s edge on a recent trip, meditating to the sound of the waves, slowing my breath to match their rhythm. I drifted backwards into my bloodstream, feeling the effects of time on the landscape around me. I thought backwards to those who had walked the sands beneath me…

My father and I talking on the porch of his one-room cottage, before sunset.

The photo I have of my Grandpa Mark (in the dark suit on the right) standing in front of his family cottage on the bluff, with his parents Royal Eaton and Hattie Eva Smith.

The photo of my Grandma Ruth (right) and my Great-Grandma Hattie Eva (back to the camera) laughing on the beach with my Great-Aunt Dorothy (far left).

The paintings my Great-Great-Grandma Hattie captured of the lake. I wonder if she ever sat where I sat. I wonder what the beaches looked like at the close of the civil war, when she might have sat with her small wooden boards and her paints and brushes.

It amazed me to hold something that she held, to see the beach through her eyes, through the way her hand skillfully translated the view she beheld. I wonder how old she was when she painted it. I wonder how young.

Where I sat on the beach, I imagined myself sitting with her, her long skirts tucked in around her legs. Did she dig her toes into the sand like I do? Did she collect rocks, too? Did she immerse herself in nature like me?

We gazed at the sunset together, a girl and a ghost, a granddaughter and a grandmother. A daughter and a mother. As the sun set, the water turned white and the clouds turned blue, and the echoes and ripples of our family danced out with the tide.

Stitching in Time: In Step with Minnie



Crafted by Minnie Estelle (Wicker) Ruston 1890-1964.

One of my favorite childhood books was Halfway Down Paddy Lane by Jean Marzollo, the story of a 15 year old girl who takes a bad fall and wakes to find herself in 1850s America, in the home of an Irish immigrant family, all of whom work at the local cotton mill (who she later discovers are her ancestors). One scene in particular has always stayed with me. One night, after working a long day in the factory, the matriarch sits out on the porch with her daughters, making lace. Not darning it, but making it. It was the first time I realized in my childhood that even the things I thought were complicated to make were, in fact, once crafted by human hands.

I am reminded of that book when I take sewing work into my lap at night. I love to hand-stitch. I enjoy the discipline of learning to sew in a straight line without a guide, and the body memory I learned that ensures my stitches will be of even size and space between them.

In the bin of my father’s family belongings, I pulled out a small quilt sampler. Based on the other mail-order patterns addressed to her, my best guess is that the sampler was made by my Great-Grandmother Minnie Estelle (Wicker) Ruston. It was loose in the bin and has some color-bleed from basement water damage over the years, but besides suffering two pinprick moth holes, it is otherwise perfect and the stitches are unmarred.

I turned the sampler over in my hands to see how it was sewn. Such tiny stitches stared up at me and I was momentarily overwhelmed. I was holding a piece of family history that spoke to something I do to calm my thoughts, something I enjoy in my time. To better reach out and connect to Great-Grandma Minnie, I set out to recreate the pattern she made, to walk in step with her.

I tried to keep to her pattern without undoing her piece, imagining that her fabric choices were probably made up of leftover scraps she had from other projects. The small pattern I drafted was made up of a circle in the center, 12 inner petals and 12 outer petals. Ten of the inner petals were paired, two of the same with two extra individual ones. I kept the same pattern for mine, with scraps I had in a drawer. Minnie’s color scheme was more white, linen and brown, while mine was white, purple and green.

There were 25 pieces in total. As I worked them together, stitch by stitch, I quickly grasped that there is artistry to this kind of piece-work. After sewing, my pieces seemed smaller than Minnie’s and it is far from a perfect replica. But the spirit of the design holds true and the intention of sharing her work ended in creating a thing of beauty I might not have endeavored to make otherwise and might never have learned how capable I was to undertake it.



Crafted by me, February 2012.



What was more wonderful was finding that the areas I had to fudge due to my inexperience were almost twin to her own sampler, ways of pulling the fabric in when there is a tad too much. And my center piece was smaller than I intended it to be, but in the making of it, I remembered how a dear friend used to make quilt circles during our U.U. services and once that memory bloomed, I figured out how to make it work (and that I should have cut it much larger).

Hand-sewing is a meditation I love, folding fabric, like time, and binding it together in the shape you desire. Hands have been stitching longer than we can remember, where men at sea and soldiers were often more capable darners and menders than wives and mothers, before sewing was ascribed a gender role. These meditations through time layer the past onto the present. I am sewing a pattern that my Great-Grandmother sewed. I can feel her hand over mine, more sure, more used to the rhythm of it.



Minnie (left) and me (right), folding time in one pattern.



To create my sampler, I used the same stitch that my Great-Grandmother used. That her Great-Grandmother used. That all those who have come before and taken a needle into their hand have used. The needle separates the edges of threads and weaves in, through the threading, the fabric, and weaves out to take breath on the other side, before diving back down again, into the earth. I am sewing and weaving the earth and sky together. I am creating.

Working on my family tree, I realized that I was meditating on the backstitch in my head. Emma Whitcher was born and died. I slid the needle into the fabric at her birth, and moved it to the left, slipping out at her point of death, life’s beginning and end. But then I move the needle back to the right, halfway, to the place where Minnie, Emma’s daughter, was born, sliding the needle in at her birth, and then all the way to the left to Minnie’s death, coming back out of the fabric. And then halfway to the right, when her daughter Ruth was born, then out to the left, where Ruth died and halfway back to where my dad was born. The rhythm repeats, through those still living and those who are yet to be, so that someday a descendant- though not mine- might find my sampler and wonder at the stitches and endeavor to step into my shoes and take a needle into their hands.

Dream Vision from my Ancestors




An original illustration from a dream vision, private collection.

 

A name trips across my tongue and dances upon my lips. Robert Moulton… born 1495 in Ormesby, a small village in North Yorkshire, England. Robert, who was alive when Columbus announced his discovery of a New World, Robert and his wife and their two-year old son John. My ancestors who were alive when a Spaniard crossed a vast black space called Ocean and found alien life on a new planet.

What did they think when the news reach their ears of a land on the other side of the ocean, strange and new and unending? Was it another story woven by fairies, or did it alter the landscape of their world? Did it change the axis of their importance in their centric universe? Did it fill them wonder?

In a dream, I am standing on an island, my feet buried in white sand, surrounded by water of a jeweled peacock hue. This is my island and the island is me, I know the edges of its boundary well. There are dark grey rocks off shore, with sun-bleached crags jutting out of the water at varying degrees. They are close, they are near and I call them Father and Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle and Sister. In the light of the morning sun I walk in the shallows among them.

Further away, where the water deepens, grey tips cut through watery skin, stones called Great-Grandmother and Great-Great-Grandfather. Each generation before me spreads out, sinking beneath the sea. The monuments lie beneath, lie within, whether my eyes can see them or not. They are there because they were.

            The ancestors whisper into me with the ebb and retreating flow of tide, leaving gifts of shell and crab, driftwood and stone behind. The ocean pulses out there, somewhere beyond what my eyes can see. There is a pull, a vibration in the water as if a voice is trying to stretch through time to reach me.

I whisper back into the roar of the surf, “I am collecting the driftwood. I am building a boat. I will find my way back to you.”

Creating Constellations



A map of stars of where my loved ones live.



I do a lot of work with mythic symbols: runes, cave paintings, indigenous drawings, the Nazca lines, Pictish symbols, etc. I like how symbols distill the larger picture down to a single silhouette, outline or image. As someone who tends to get lost in the bigger picture, it helps me better understand the essence or spirit of the thing.

It’s the same idea as taking your genealogy and creating it into a visual tree, with names as leaves, where the oldest known homelands as roots burrowed into the ground, your foundation. It’s a beautiful thing that art does. It shows something outside of its expected interpretation, offering another dimension of context by which to view it.

In the deep winter, when the trees are barren and naked, I look to the stars. I imagine how the oldest ancestors studied their patterns and trusted their fixed points enough to navigate the world. They used the stars in the sky as a compass to explore previously unknown terrain, to aid their exploration. Our ancestors ventured into water that had no visible end just to see what was on the other side. How powerful the stars are, that their constancy made man put faith in them.

I study constellations as a hobby. I am no master of names or places in the sky but I can recognize my old friends and I look to the summer sky for friendly faces, gazing at them as I used to do on camping trips with my family: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, Draco. Those nights around the fire with my parents and my siblings are some of my fondest memories, just us immersed in nature, a glittering starry sky above us. It’s a reminder I carry with me now, that they are still above me, even when the sun obscures their view…like those we love are still with us, even when death has claimed them.

When we are small our lives revolve around our immediate parents and grandparents, including our childhood playmates. As we grow older, our worlds and our circles expand. We know people who live in other cities, we grow closer to distant relatives. Our web gets larger and we begin to collect people important to our growth, our chosen family. No matter where we travel, they remain a part of us, a fixed point in our lives, and that love and gratitude never tarnishes or fades. Even when our friends and family are separated from us by geographical distance, the love we feel for each other exists as something solid in us.



My starburst.



Even still, it’s hard to hold that image in the isolation of the winter months. A few years ago I wanted to make a visual representation of the web of people in my life. To start, I took a map of the world, and put a dot where I lived. Then I charted a dot in every city where my loved ones and chosen family lived. Some dots became larger than others, in areas where my roots were deeper, becoming brighter stars on my map of my sky.

When that was done, I drew lines from each dot into the one that represented where I lived. What I found was a wonderful image, a starburst, light blooming out into the world that represented the landscape of loving energy I had created. It was as if the dark gloom of winter melted away beneath its image.



A stilt-walker creature from The Dark Crystal?



A winding path and journey forwards?



A diamond, opening like a box so the light comes out?



That starburst became my personal symbol of joy, a totem I burned onto a wooden disc to carry with me in my mojo bag. I created my own constellation, my own constant companion. Sometimes, as a meditation, I play with it, mapping out the cities and playing connect-the-dots in various ways to see what images I find, like the Big Dipper, the Bear or Cassiopeia’s necklace.

Now, unlike the fixed stars in the heavens, the ones in my life do move around the world and the shape of my personal constellation changes. But I have learned to accept change as the only constant I can count on. Some stars go out and people leave my life, either through death, a move or a falling out we can’t seem to come back from, which doesn’t negate the love we had for each other when we had it.

Every winter I revisit and reshape the stars in my universe, a reminder of how loved I am, and how far-reaching the web of friends has become. This exercise reminds me that I never truly walk alone. My feet walk the earth where others before me have walked, eyes tilted up to the same stars I see, the same stars those who come after will see.

Have gratitude for the love you have in your life, for the lives you have touched and the ones that have stirred your soul. Create your own symbol, whether it be a web, a starburst, a constellation, a collage. Make yourself something you can touch and hold that reminds you of your blessings and fills your spirit with peace.