A Little History

One day this week, my mom brought this picture by for me to see. The picture is of my grandfather and my dad when he was about 2 years old, around 1935. My mom thought my dad looked a lot like OBB.

















My favorite show right now is "Who Do You Think You Are?". It comes on NBC on Friday nights and is all about celebrities and their geneologies. While there haven't been too many celebrities on there whom I have particular affection for, the stories are very interesting to me.

Last year, I started doing work on Ancestry.com and researched my family back to the 1500s in England. It's the kind of thing you pick up and work on feverishly for a while and then get burnt out on and have to let go of for a bit. But this show has renewed my interest in it.

So all of these things caused me to go digging for some other pictures that I received last year from my grandmother - pictures of my great-grandparents.

So first, a little background...

OBB gets his name from several men named Charles, but the most prominent one for me is my great-grandfather, Charles Burr. He was a missionary in India in the early 20th century. Soon after my grandfather was born in 1905, his parents departed with him for Ahmednagar, India to work in a school there. There was a whole group of missionaries who lived there over many years and several generations. My great-grandmother's parents had also been missionaries there.

In fact, there was one missionary family who had a son the same age as my grandfather, whom he became close to. When the boys reached 13, they were sent back to the US for high school and stayed on a family friend's farm together during their high school years. They were referred to as the "farm boys". The incredibly coincidental thing about it is that this boy's name was Albert Beals.

I remember when I told my grandmother I was engaged and how she said my grandfather would have loved it that I was marrying a Beals.

So here is a picture of my great-grandparents, Charles and Annie, and their son, Donald (my grandfather) right before their departure for India (1907).

















And this is a picture of Charles, Annie and my grandfather (a little more grown up) with the people they worked with in India (1914).

















All throughout his life, my grandfather loved India. He loved Indian food (lots of curry!) and relished his boyhood days there. He would tell me how life was so simple there. He remembered how at the end of the day, his father would walk outside on his porch and the people would be lined up for him to tend to the sores on the bottoms of their feet. He told me his favorite thing to do was to hike to the top of a nearby hill with his father at night and lay in the grass staring up at all the stars.

And just to bring things full circle, here is my grandfather with my mom and dad and yep, that's me in the middle, Christmas 1977.
















I think the more you understand about people's past, the more you understand them. It's definitely worth the time and effort to take a good look into your family history and see what's there because it helps to shape how you see yourself.