More Pieces of the Puzzle

Uncle Howard, Nana (Olga Crawford), Jeanne, my birth mother

"From out of the past where forgotten things belong
You keep coming back like a song"--Irving Berlin, 1946

Around Mother's Day, 2014, I finally located my birth mother's birth certificate. I blogged about that here: http://atouchoftarragon.blogspot.com/2014/05/mystery-partially-solved.html

A few days ago, in the midst of my daily hospital ICU stays with my boyfriend, a victim of smoke inhalation from the Canyon 2 fires near Orange Hills, I received an email from a woman who wrote, 

"A member of a theater organ group just sent me a link to a post on YouTube by someone named Theresa Elders who also said she was a granddaughter of Jesse Crawford."

Yep, I've said that all my life. I knew my Grandfather Jesse. I even blogged about that here: http://atouchoftarragon.blogspot.com/2012/07/all-those-years-agojune-28-and-july-1.html

Jeanne, Patti, Olga

More importantly, though, she wrote that she had been doing genealogical research and was the keeper of the family photos. She sent me this one, and asked if I recognized the people in it. Of course I did. It's my mother, Jeanne, and my Nana, propping up a toddler who clearly is my sister Patti, even though it was not labeled as such. I have my sister's baby photos, and this indeed is Patti. I don't have a photo o Jeanne...the only one I had was destroyed in an apartment garage fire in the early sixties. But I remember what Jeanne looked like. And, of course, Nana, too, even though I'd not seen them since around 1948, when I was 11. She sent me other photos after I replied, including one I already had of my Uncle Howard, who came to my 1955 wedding. But it was the photos of my birth mother, especially, that I was overjoyed to get. I can share them with other family members who have long wondered about who Patti and I looked like.

Jeanne and Howard

Olga

I've always known I looked more like the Crawfords, than the Burgesses. Patti looks like our birth father, Al Burgess, but as I study these photos, I see that she has some of Nana's earlier looks, as well. This was the first time I'd seen photos of Nana as a young woman.

This newly-discovered first cousin lives not far from Santa Barbara, so it's possible that some day we'll meet in person. Even if that doesn't come about, I intend to scan some of the early photos I have of Patti and me, so she can include them with the family collection that she's overseeing. It seems that she and her children all inherited the Crawford musical gene, as did my mother and her father, and my sister, Patti.

Jeanne, Jesse, Howard

My boyfriend, who founded the Orange County Jewish Genealogical Society suspects that the Tijuana train photo was taken right here in Los Angeles, on Olvera Street. He has the same photo from his own Boyle Heights childhood, and does not recall traveling to Tijuana with his mom. I also noted the misspelling of the city, Tijuana's name on the train.

 My cousin also has a copy of my mother's birth certificate. She died in Los Angeles in 1967, from complications related to alcoholism. I've long known this, since my birth father told me about how he signed her into a facility around 1940, when she was no longer able to take care of Patti and me. I'd been told tales of mental instability, but he said it was alcoholism. I know that Nana, too, had issues with alcohol, and can remember asking Grandma Gertie about why she smelled so different when she visited me as a child.

As a former director of an alcoholism residential treatment facility in Long Beach in the early  '80s, I know that few programs existed for treatment for men or women in the '30s and '40s. I also know that Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in the mid '30s, focused on men, not women. I wonder now if Nana and Jeanne would have lived longer had they been born in decades later. I know it's futile to wonder what might have been. But I've always loved alternate histories... and wish I had the skill of Harry Turtledove!

For my sister's children and grandchildren, I'm appreciative of receiving these photos, and plan to notify them to take a peek at this blog for a big surprise!

And for those who wonder about my boyfriend's recovery...he's home from his hospital stay, and making slow but steady progress. He's eager to help me find out a little more about where my mother was during those missing years. I did find a photo of the house in downtown Los Angeles, in the Westlake area, that's listed on her death certificate.

Even though her last years probably were grim, given the list of alcohol-related illnesses on that certificate, I'm happy to know that she had remarried...and it's because of that other surname that I've never been able to find her after the 1940 census. I hope some of those days had joyous moments for her.