We’re on the road to a family reunion.
This weekend marks the 70th reunion of the descendants of Albert Campbell Smith and Mary Susan Mallow of West Virginia. My grandmother, Rebecca Florence Smith Baldinger, was their second daughter. I’ve written about her before.
It’s only the second reunion I’ve made it to, and only my third or fourth trip to that area.
Travel
We did the trip in two days, overnighting in Columbus after visiting Sister-in-Law and Number Three Son. The forecast called for rain in both Oklahoma and West Virginia, but we didn’t really see any rain until we got to the Davis area.
The original route that Google proposed took us down US 33 through Lancaster to Athens where we would have picked up US 50 through Parkersburg. Parkersburg is just a few miles down the river from Marietta, and Diana hadn’t been there for 30 years, so we instead took 70 across to Cambridge and 77 into Marietta (to get us there a little faster) so she could visit Marietta College. We visited her old ΣΣΣ sorority house, which is now the MC Admissions office. One of the tour guides took us—or rather followed Diana—through the house as she reminisced. I remarked at one point that I’d seen more of the house in that hour than I had the entire time we dated.
We stopped in to Hermann Fine Arts Center, where my dad taught for almost twenty years. His office is now a music computer lab. I still heard his voice in Hermann 217, the rehearsal room where so many Messiah and Pops Concert pieces got polished.
From there, we hit Gilman Student Center, where our relationship began. Back then, the bars downtown ran $0.25 draft specials until 6:00 PM on Friday night. Students would go spend a few dollars on cheap beer, then stagger back to the dining hall (just four blocks away) just in time for dinner. The dining hall staff hated policing the drunk students, so they traded us our presence for a free meal on Friday nights. I’d usually post up at a corner table and “prevent by presence,” as the saying goes.
One night, the Tri-Sigma girls showed up and jokingly chastised me for taking “their” table. Diana and I had met several months prior and had a few things in common, so she joined in the teasing and sat next to me. Over the next hour or so, conversation and dinner guests ebbed and flowed as the Sigmas left and the Delta Tau Delta guys showed up. But Diana stayed there the whole time. Later, she asked me to walk her back to the sorority house as part of our escort service, which I happily did.
That dinner conversation gave me the courage to ask her a few days later. That was thirty-three years ago, and look at us now.
I also stopped by the Campus Police Office to see what had changed since then, and a lot has. They’re on their third chief since I left, which isn’t bad. They don’t use students as assistants any longer, and only have one dispatcher, but they make do.
And it turned out the officer I was talking to was the younger brother of a high-school classmate.
We made it to the Davis area in good time, though the last half of the trip was a little unnerving. Waze took us along US 50 to Clarksburg, then 38 to St. George, which is where things went a little haywire compared to the way we went back in the 80s. It told me to make a turn at one point that had me thinking we’d appear on national news as a cautionary tale about blindly following a GPS.
It’s never a good sign when the center line disappears.
We went up and down and through a bunch of narrow, blind curves that would have had my mother’s fingers putting dents in the door.
I checked Dad’s old records after we arrived and I think in the 80s, we turned south at Bridgeport, taking I-79 down to WV 48 near Weston. Another possibility is that we took WV 20 from Clarksburg to Buckhannon, then picked up WV 48. Then I think we stayed on WV 48 to Elkins where we traded it for US 33, which we took into Harman and WV 32. Dad’s route would have taken us in from the south. Waze brought us in from the north, and neither Diana or I were a huge fan.
West Virginia
I didn’t have many plans for Friday other than seeing Blackwater Falls. The family visited in 1969, but I was deemed too young to walk down to the falls, so Mom and I waited for Dad and Hal to go down and come back up. I have no recollection of what we did while we were waiting.
It was misting steadily when we got there, but we both had rain jackets, so we hit the trail. About halfway down the boardwalk, there’s a large wooden photo frame such that the falls appear as the backdrop of the photo. You sit in a large swing and either take a timed selfie using the provided ledge, or someone takes a picture for you. We went with the latter, and I managed to tip over the back of the swing. Such is life.
The falls were running fast and heavy due to all the rain the area’s had over the last few weeks. That much water moving that fast is such a powerful and humbling experience, at least for me. Diana said it was like sitting by a fire; she could watch it for hours.
After the falls, we decided to wander a bit. Dad made lots of notes about family locations back in the 80s, but most of his notes involve distances from known points. He didn’t use many road names, but then again, I suspect he didn’t know many of them. They’ve likely changed in the last 40+ years anyway, especially as Enhanced 911 systems came online.
As we drove along WV 72 toward Parsons, I noticed a cemetery and church on the right side, both called Flanagan Hill. The Smiths owned a farm on Flanagan Hill, so I pulled into the church, assuming this was the primary family cemetery.
It was.
We found at least half a dozen Smith graves and I was kind of proud of myself for recognizing so many of the names. We saw Denver Lee, Lincoln, and several others, and then I found my great-grandparents.
It wasn’t quite as emotional a moment as I might have expected. I think that was because I knew who Albert was and knew that he was buried there. This wasn’t a case of discovering someone I didn’t know. It was nice to find his grave though.
Thoughts
Nan died in 1980, age 88. She had dementia before they really called it that. Five of her siblings were still alive then, though I’m not sure she knew the three oldest. I’m not clear when she left her family, so I don’t know if Hazel, Edith, and Robert had been born. Though now as I think about it, I recall reading that Hazel, whenever she heard Rebecca’s name, would say she didn’t have a sister by that name. I’d guess Hazel was very young when Nan left, because she married in New Jersey in 1921. Hazel, born in 1911, would have been just ten then, and I’m reasonably sure Nan left before then.
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if we’d found her family while she was still alive. She’d died just five years before we found them.
I will always wonder why she so completely cut contact with her family. I get wanting to leave; I’ve said before I understood wanting something more than what was likely ahead of her. But why disown her family the way she did? She told the insurance company in 1945 that her parents had died years before, but they were still alive.
Pure speculation, but I wonder if Nan and her parents argued about her leaving and maybe pressured her to come back. Or maybe they just didn’t approve of Ed Baldinger for some reason.
So many questions.
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