Crista Cowan: 0:01

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. Sometimes one person's trash is another person's treasure. You've heard that Well, in my family that became very apparent as my father's Aunt Madeline was downsizing her home towards the end of her life. Now here's what you need to know about Aunt Madeline. First of all, she always required that we call her Aunt Madeline. There were no nicknames allowed. We couldn't call her by just her first name, and that put in some way a little bit of distance between us emotionally, and maybe that's what she wanted.

Crista Cowan: 0:59

My Aunt Madeline was my grandfather's younger sister. Now you've heard me talk about Carrie, and you've heard me talk about her son Frederick and his wife Lillian from Texas and how they ended up out in California. They had two children in two years my Aunt Dorothy and my grandfather and then, 13 years later, aunt Madeline came along. So she was already coming into a situation with a father who was a military officer, a mother raised by German parents, with some of the sternness that that implies, and two siblings who were so much older than her that a lot of times she felt like an only child. Growing up in Los Angeles, in Westwood, in a burgeoning neighborhood in the 1930s it was the Depression, but they had good employment, and so she didn't feel a lot of the effects of that. They had built their home over a decade before she was born, and so she had the security of not having to deal with some of the housing insecurity and food insecurities that some of her classmates had to deal with, so she weathered that pretty well. She was still a child when World War II broke out, and I have pictures of her with my grandfather as he was in uniform and heading off to war. Also, by the time the war ended her father died, and so her teenage years were then spent with a widowed mother who was grieving deeply.

Crista Cowan: 2:39

My grandma Cowan for all the stories that I've heard, was a very stern woman. She did not like my grandmother, who married into the family and stole her sonny away. It was even worse that my grandmother was a redhead and even worse that she was a Mormon Like there was just so many strikes against her, that that created a lot of animosity in the family and I often wonder how much of that rubbed off on Madeline as the teenage child in that home with a grieving mother who's now also mourning the loss of her son to this woman. So even though my grandfather was very attentive to his mother, even though they always lived fairly close, they started having children and bringing the grandchildren over to visit. There was still a little bit of animosity in the family. Now I'm told that by the time I came along as the very first great-grandchild in that family that my great-grandmother softened. I'm told that when my mom married my dad and started bringing me around, that she was a lot more mellow in her old age, but somehow Aunt Madeline maintained some of that sternness. She was never warm and cuddly by any means, but we kept visiting her.

Crista Cowan: 4:01

My father felt it was very important to maintain really good relationships with his family. He wanted to tell us all the stories. We would go visit Grandma Cowan in her house until she passed when I was a few years old. He would make sure that we understood the relationships and how everybody in the family fit together. We'd go visit Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Madeline and they would come over to visit us. That was important to my dad that they maintain those relationships.

Crista Cowan: 4:27

Despite the fact that they weren't warm and fuzzy when Grandma Cowan died, there were a few things in her possession that my dad wanted to make sure did not leave the family. One of those was a grand piano that she had, and Aunt Dorothy the oldest my grandfather's oldest sister decided she wanted it and so my grandfather loaded it up and drove it all the way up to Oregon so that she could have that. Years later, when she was downsizing her home, she would my grandfather would go back up to Oregon and drive it down to North Hollywood to deliver it to my dad's younger sister. And just a few years ago, when my Aunt Rhonda passed away, I drove to Los Angeles from Utah and packed up that piano and brought it here to Utah. So that particular family treasure has stayed in the family and that was so important again to my dad and I have learned the importance of that, of those family heirlooms and making sure that they're cared for and watched out for.

Crista Cowan: 5:33

My grandfather inherited his mother's crystal chandelier that hung in her formal dining room of her home, and it hung in the formal dining room of my grandparents' home my entire life and it hung in the formal dining room of my grandparents' home my entire life. And when we were cleaning out my grandmother's house my father made sure that it was taken down and carefully packed away piece by piece, and he has inherited that and it now hangs in my parents' formal dining room, put back together piece by piece. But there were a lot of other treasures that just kind of disappeared Pictures, letters, documents, things that we kind of had a vague idea. My grandmother had photo albums but nobody knew what happened to them and we suspected that either Dorothy or Madeline or maybe one of my dad's sisters had helped pack up the house when Grandma Cowan died and taken those with them Years later. As a matter of fact, I was in my 30s, maybe even my early 40s. At the time Madeline, who had pulled away from the family in a really odd way, sent an email to my Aunt Rhonda. Now here's what you need to know about how my Aunt Madeline pulled away from the family before I tell you about that email.

Crista Cowan: 6:58

My grandfather died in 2000. At the end of the year his funeral was held in the dead of winter and, for whatever reason, I couldn't get away to go down to California for the funeral. But my dad called me after the funeral to tell me about how it had been and he relayed a very odd story. Standing in the cemetery at the side of my grandfather's grave, surrounded by her sister-in-law, her nieces and nephews, her great nieces and nephews, my Aunt Madeline made a final bold statement that now that my grandfather was dead she had no more family and she turned and walked away and left everybody standing there kind of with their mouths hanging open, wondering what had just happened. That moment became this kind of defining thing for the next 15 years of her life and my dad's sister, rhonda, would reach out to Madeline every few months just to check in, just to make sure she knew she still had family.

Crista Cowan: 8:06

But again, aunt Madeline wasn't a warm and fuzzy person and so she didn't make a whole lot of effort to reciprocate and she didn't make a whole lot of effort to extend those conversations. So one day I was standing in my Aunt Rhonda's store she owned a gift and costume shop in Los Angeles and she would sit in the back on a chair with a Diet Coke in one hand and a cookie in the other and kind of rule the roost. And I walked into the store one day and gave her a big hug because we are warm and fuzzy people and I asked her about Aunt Madeline and she said oh you know, it's been a few months since I've talked to her. Maybe we should call her together. And so there in the back of Rhonda's store on speakerphone we called Madeline and again it was like talking to a stranger and that kind of breaks my heart because I knew this woman had stories. I knew she had stories about my grandpa. I knew she had stories about my great grandma Cowan. I knew she had stories about her grandpa. I knew she had stories about my great grandma Cowan. I knew she had stories about her dad, who I had never known because he died long before any of us came along. And I craved so much that connection with her and those stories. But instead in that particular conversation what she said was well, I've had cancer for a few months and I'm trying to make some plans about what to do next. But you all don't need to worry about me, I'll be fine. And that was pretty much the end of the conversation. She didn't ask about any of us. She didn't ask about any of my brothers or sisters. She didn't ask how my dad was doing. It just was a really abrupt conversation. My dad was doing. It just was a really abrupt conversation.

Crista Cowan: 9:50

So months later, when Rhonda got the email from Madeline, that was kind of the headspace we were all in was that she had just pulled away, kind of. Finally, the email read like this it said something to the effect of I'm downsizing my house, I'm moving into a facility, I've got some old boxes of pictures and things from my mom and if nobody wants them I'll just throw them on the burn pile. I loved family and family history and family stories. She knew how important it was and would be to me to know what was in those boxes and even if it was trash, she was going to make sure that I had it and that I got to see that that I got to make that decision. She immediately replied to Madeline's email and said here is my UPS shipping number. Here is Crista's address. Let's get that to her right away. And then she called me and we laughed about how crazy it seems almost that Aunt Madeline was that she just like how grateful I am that she sent the email and didn't just throw the things on the burn pile, and I didn't even know what was in the boxes yet. But the fact that that would even occur to her or that she would even threaten that was really heartbreaking to know that this particular family member just was so disconnected from us.

Crista Cowan: 11:20

Within just a couple of days I received these boxes in the mail Long little flat. I think they were actually old VCR boxes, like do you remember how? They kind of the shape of a VCR, I think that's what they were. I don't even remember. I might even remember the brand if I thought about it. Boxes, and inside these boxes were photo albums that my great grandmother had meticulously put together of her young adult and teenage years.

Crista Cowan: 11:55

She had gotten her first camera when she was a teenager and had started taking pictures, and back then that was a rare thing to have a camera, to own a camera and then to be able to afford to get those pictures developed. And she took pictures of everything. She did little formal photo shoots with her family, she and her sister, her younger sister, selma, would dress up and take pictures. She would go visit her family down. She lived in Dallas, texas. She would go visit her family down in Brenham and the Hill Country and she would take pictures of their kids and their property and their cars. And then she went to El Paso once on a whim with her sister to see the army. The army there was doing a parade and a big exhibition and they went to go see it and there they met and fell in love with two soldiers who happened to be best friends and they started this long distance courtship which ultimately ended up in them getting married and then a long distance relationship for the first couple years of marriage, as he was shipped off to serve in World War One off to serve in World War I. And all of that was documented in these photo albums three of them and my Aunt Madeline was just going to throw those on the burn pile.

Crista Cowan: 13:19

Those were the first treasures I found in those boxes. Other treasures included rolled up scrolls of baptismal and marriage certificates from all of Grandma Cowan's family members that she had kept, formal portraits that the family had had taken and pictures that other family members had sent them. Cousins and aunts and uncles of their families Photos I had never seen before and didn't even know existed and almost ceased to exist, were in those boxes. Also in the box was a little family crest. Now if you know anything about genealogy you know that there's really not any such thing as a family crest. The arms and the crests that are given to certain noble families, particularly in Europe, usually belong to a person and that person then can pass that on to a child or a grandchild or a nephew, and sometimes that inheritor then modifies it slightly to make it a little bit their own, to make it a little bit their own. So family crests are a little bit of a bogus thing in family history and sometimes I make fun of them.

Crista Cowan: 14:29

But I found this Cowan family crest that had been hand-drawn in that box, and I remembered a conversation I had had years earlier with my father, and my father had told me that Aunt Madeline had had this crest commissioned for the family. She'd had it made back in like the 1970s when I was just a little girl. He also told me that she had shown enough interest in family history that she had hired a couple of professional genealogists to see if they could find out the origin of the Cowan surname. She was very tied to our surname, she was very connected to the name that she bore, and so she had commissioned this work to be done and she had, in a moment of weakness or softness, I'm not sure which given a copy of that to my father.

Crista Cowan: 15:26

And so when I started in family history, when I was 12 years old and my dad bought me my first shiny new computer Compact 64, with the very first DOS-based genealogy software personal ancestral file loaded on it, one of the things that he had handed me was this file of research that Aunt Madeline had commissioned and he'd asked me to do the data entry to get that information into this genealogy software program.

Crista Cowan: 15:54

And in that moment, as I sat there looking at that box and staring at that family crest, that story came back to me of how she'd commissioned that family crest, at the same time she'd hired that genealogist and that the very research that got me started in knowing more about my Cowan family history, about that branch of my family tree, had come from my Aunt Madeline.

Crista Cowan: 16:17

So even though she became disconnected, even though, for whatever reason, she didn't want a close relationship with us, even though she almost threw those treasures on the trash pile, she left me a legacy. She left me a legacy of knowledge about my family and she left me ultimately with that box of treasures that she thought maybe nobody wanted, and so, now that she's long gone, I still, every time I look at those pictures or turn the pages of my great grandmother's photo album, I'm so grateful to my Aunt Madeline that whatever connection she felt with family, that she preserved it long enough for it to end up in my hands and now through my hands, as I've digitized all of that and started uploading it to my online tree that will be shared with the family and preserved for a long time.