ROOTS & BRANCHES

I reflected in the “Roots & Branches” column a couple of weeks ago about how the house in which I live has reached a century of family ownership.

As careful readers will note, one of my most faithful correspondents is Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico, who has deep Pennsylvania roots but not to a specific house such as mine.

“It’s nice you have that connection to your past—your own youth, and an ancestral link—bound up in the boards and paint and trees of a family property,” Bender wrote. “I don’t have that.”

He speculated that a wandering foot might be responsible for that. “Maybe it’s the result of a nomadic nature in my family (we’re all over the map!),” he wrote.

Bender said the closest his family had to it was a house of 27 years in Los Alamos, which was “right at the edge of town, right up against the mountain.”

He says his mother sold it after his father died and that, sadly, he can’t even go for a drive-by. “It (and all the trees) burned down in the Cerro Grande Fire 20 years ago,” Bender lamented.

Where Bender gets the most feelings of connection are from the generations-removed family properties in Pennsylvania—particularly in the area of Myerstown in Lebanon County—such as the Tice Farm, the Mosser Plantation, and Tulpehocken Manor (whose earliest residents were the Ley family).

Interestingly, he says those were all homes of Bender in-laws. Even the house on Tenth Street (formerly Mulberry Street), Lebanon, where his Bender great-grandparents lived for 40 or 50 was actually purchased by his great-grandmother, by herself, possibly with an inheritance from her grandmother.

Bender has also wondered about the reasons for that wandering foot he described. “One of my cousins was doing research on his family in turn-of-the-century New York City and he noticed, as I had with my Pennsylvania family, that they moved around a lot,” he wrote. “He told me he was told it was because they could lease a place and get 13 months for a year’s worth of rents. So, they moved frequently.”

Which makes Bender speculate that there must have been a degree of poverty in the family, if moving every year or two was worth it for a month of free rent.

“They must have had few possessions; otherwise, the moves would just have been too difficult, I think,” he wrote.

As for the last speculation—it’s possible but I think maybe there’s a little case of “presentism” going on here. Bender’s families’ lack of possessions simply may have been typical of the time.

But, in any case, Bender’s story shows that family history need not be tied to a particular house.