Author: Philip Weiss

In addition to meeting a bunch of second cousins and going to a funeral, one of the things I did yesterday (Sunday, that is), was to help clean out aunt Babe’s house. My great grandfather Joseph bought this house in September 1908. Babe has lived there almost her entire life. Since no living relative lives in Madison, it was clean now or leave it to people to do piecemeal when they are in town.

The house itself isn’t in great shape. It dates from the 1870s, when it was a one floor, two room building. An upstairs and a couple of rooms on the side were added later, though I have no idea when. Plumbing and electricity have been added, as well as a foundation. I’m not sure what’s holding it together. Floors sagging. Walls tilting. Portions of ceilings fallen in. It’ll keep lions and tigers and bears out, but not varmints.

I mention that because varmints have been getting in for years. But other than the rooms that Babe inhabited (kitchen, dining room, living room), what the varmints left behind (droppings, chewed up clothing, their dead bodies) hadn’t been removed for a long time. There was enough disease causing detritus in the dust that we all wore masks. Most of us wore heavy duty gloves as well. The pants I wore? They are sitting in a corner now and I’m not going to put them on again until they’re washed twice. We filled 40 or 50 trash bags with clothing, bedding, broken phones, curtains, old Christmas lights, and things we couldn’t even identify.

But buried in all that crud were some gems. Some of the furniture pieces are 100+ year old antiques. They’ll need to be re-upholstered and re-finished for sure. There were hundreds of photos and letters. Photos dating to the civil war. Those looked vaguely like my second great grandfather, Anton Weiss. But we’re not completely sure, because the photos where he’s positively identified were late in life where he’s about 75 years old. Aunt Babe’s letters from Bunny Berigan are there. The deed to the house was there, including the entire history of ownership of the property since 1843 (a lot of the important Wisconsin settlers owned the land at one point or another). There are books and jewelry, including some obvious wedding rings. We’ll have to have a jeweler look at those to see when they were made so we can guess as to whose they were. I’m salivating for when I can get copies of the photos. I did keep a bag of newspaper clippings that had been used as bookmarks. Most of them are obituaries of distant family members.

Anyway, the house wasn’t a hoarders lair. It just hadn’t been cleaned. If you are in the baby boom generation, do your children a favor and go through your stuff now. You’ve got 10 or 30 good years left in you. Get rid of the junk. Clean around the stuff that isn’t junk. Let your family spend their time around the funeral drinking to your memory, fighting over who gets stuck with the lime green chair you love, and poring over your photo albums and old love letters. That part is awesome! Cleaning rat feces, not so much.

I posted a brief note over on the LiveJournal that my great aunt Babe passed away Monday morning. But I locked it because not everyone in the family had heard yet. Not really knowing Babe, I have little to say about her. My main reaction is, damn, you had a good long life. She was born 14 July 1908 in Merrill, Wisconsin. Her family moved to Madison that September, and she lived in that city for the rest of her life. In fact, she lived in the same house for the rest of her life. She was a stylin’ single girl in the late 1920s and 1930s. She dated Bunny Berigan for a time. She worked as an office manager until the early 1970s when she retired. All of this is stuff I learned from reading her letters today or from family members.

So I came to Madison for the funeral. Not because I’m grieving for Aunt Babe. Because she’s the last of her generation in my family, I wanted to honor her life and to support the family members who were close to her. Babe, like her two sisters, never married. But she did a lot of the work raising her brother Glenn’s children after Glenn’s wife died. So his children and grandchildren were very close to her. I wanted to be present for them.

Another reason to come is that a number of those second cousins I haven’t previously met. Without Babe, I didn’t know if the disparate branches would continue to communicate. So I wanted to come to meet them and make friends. Present were my aunts Sue and Jane, her husband and my cousins Dave and Sarah. Them I know. My second cousins Katzi and Lisa came along with their mother. They’re from the Portland area, so I see them a few times a year too. I met Martha, Peter and Caroline for the first time. Those are Glenn’s children mentioned above. Peter’s sons Chris and Stephen came too. Chris I’ve met once, but Stephen was new to me. Another second cousin who came was Katherine. At this point, there’s only one second cousin in the Weiss family I haven’t met. I don’t know if we’ll stay in contact, but I didn’t establish contact, we certainly wouldn’t stay in contact.

Between my dad dying young, mom remarrying, and my grandfather getting divorced a few years before I was born, I don’t feel as connected to the family on my father’s side of the family as much, other than my first cousins from the Seattle area. With all the close family members who’ve died recently, I’ve been spurred to build those connections I haven’t had before. That’s a big reason why I’ve been so big into the genealogy since my grandparents died.

Anyhow, for the short term, mission accomplished.