The Box

Like Mary Poppins’ magical bag stuffed with never ending wonders, the old cardboard box kept my grandparents, mother, and I pulling out discovery after discovery. At the top of the box’s contents were dozens and dozens of photos of unknown ancestors, some with identifiers and others without.

“James M. Frazer? Who’s that?”

“Mary Ann McGovern?”

“Are these their children?”

Curious to discover more, we dug deeper into the “magical box.” As we each pulled out some new item, we studied and analyzed our findings. My grandmother, finding a very old, skinny book, sat down on a dining room chair and started carefully examining the book’s pages.

“Oh my word! Ramona, look at this!”

Her excitement captured our attention.

"In Memory of W. M. Lewis Herndon, Commander of the U.S.N.... 'On the 12th day of September last, at sea, the U.S. Mail Steamship Central America, with the California mails, most of the passengers and crew, and a large amount of treasure on board, foundered in a gale of wind.'"

We gasped!
What could this be?

As we would learn later, the SS Central America was one of a fleet of ships commissioned by the U.S. government to handle the people, wealth, and mail that needed transporting between the California gold fields and New York City during the mid-nineteenth century. Passengers would travel on these steam wheelers from California to Panama, take a open air train across the isthmus, and then pick up another steam wheeler at Aspinwall which carried them to New York after a brief stop in Havana. On September 12, 1857, the side-wheel steamer, S.S. Central America, hit a tremendous hurricane two hundred miles off the Carolina coast. Four hundred and twenty-five passengers and crew, along with nearly two million dollars worth of gold and thirty-five thousand pieces of mail were lost, sinking eight-thousand feet to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

But what does this tragic American disaster have to do with my ancestor? Only everything…

The Beginning Continued...

What makes 60 year-old grandparents jump into a 15-passenger van and drive across the continent from Olympia, Washington to Orlando, Florida? A cardboard box. Yes, this is one of those family history stories that starts with a box: a box covered in dust, found in a basement, under a bed, or in a closet, placed there by the provident fairy that filled it with a genealogist’s dream treasure. This story is no different.

After discovering the stack of letters in the hutch, my mother called her parents to share the findings. Reacting with the same excitement we had felt, my grandparents said, “You know, there’s this old cardboard box that we’ve had in our basement for years that great Aunt Cassie gave us before she died. We’ve never known what to do with it.” Still on the phone with my mother, they unearthed the box and started going through its contents. Through the telephone we heard exclamation after exclamation:

“Wow!”

“Oh my word!”

“What is this?”

Gasp!

“Ramona, you won’t believe it!”

Gasp!

“Wow!”

“What! What!” my mother demanded back.

“The stuff in this box is too precious and fragile to mail. We’re bringing it ourselves!”

From their home in Washington State, my grandparents packed up their 15-passenger van, while my mom and I waited impatiently at our home in Orlando, Florida. We charted their path across the continent on a large US map as each day slowly went by. Finally, the big old van and the anything-but-ordinary cardboard box arrived! We all wasted no time but dove immediately into the box and carefully began withdrawing its contents, only to reveal the absolutely unbelievable….

To be continued…..

The Beginning

The day felt like any other day, that is, until I lifted my head from my school work on the table to the family's dinning room hutch across from me.

“Mom, what are those?”

My little eleven-year-old voice turned my mother’s attention from her daily task to my little finger pointing to the old, tall side-board against the wall. Together we peered through the display glass window into the collection of fragile heirlooms, handed down from my mother’s parents. In the back left corner was a worn-out pouch, with a carefully embroidered “M” on the front.

“I don’t know. Let’s look!"

We carefully opened the hutch with its long antique keys and gently removed the bulging pouch, placing it on the dining room table. We tingled with curiosity as we opened the flap to the pouch. “They're letters,” my mother deduced. Letters? We pulled out the worn-out stack of papers, and discovered letter after letter after letter of correspondence between my mother’s great-great grandfather’s family, the Messegees. As we began to interpret the old-fashioned cursive handwriting, our minds filled with wonder and our hearts with joy. Ancestors we had never heard of, life histories, vital information and more were all preserved on these personal documents. My little eyes got bigger with excitement, and my child heart grew with my mother’s as I saw her joy increase with each letter we studied together. This was the start of my love for family history. And this was only the beginning of one of the greatest journeys my family would take - the discovering our long lost heritage.