Family History

Every since I was younger I have been learning about my family history.  My Grandmother is a storyteller. She writes scripts of the lives of our ancestors.  She likes to do all the research to find out who they really were and their life long stories to know where we all really came from.  My Grandmother will write these stories from our ancestors perspective and she will come up with her own voice or accent that fits them perfectly.  After she has done all her research, written the script and perfected her new voice she must now make the outfit. She does more research on what our family members use to wear back when they were alive and she goes out and buys all the fabric and tools she needs to make the clothes for that storytelling.  She hand makes all of her clothes as seen in the picture above.

One of the ancestors that my grandmother portrays is names Eunice Lakeman Hoar.  She is my Grandmother fourth great grandmother she lived from 1776 to 1846. She tells the story of how her, her husband and their nine children traveled a twenty mile journey by foot in the winter from Avon to Rangeley.  Their purpose of her telling this story is because they were supposedly the first white settlers in rangely.

My Grandmother loved to involve me and my cousins, aunts and uncles in her story telling.  He storytelling shows are very interactive, she will have people from the audience come up and walk with her as if they’re walking through the snow and she will pull kids up, mainly my cousins and I to represent the nine kids she had to travel with just so the audience could really see how many people that is.  When we were younger she would have us come to her shows just for that main reason is to have us participate in her shows, mainly as her own amusement.

Ever since I was younger I have always gone over to my Grandmother’s house in Lamoine for a week in the summer, if you do not know where Lamoine is it right next to Bar Harbor.  Anyway I always go there for a whole week in the summer so I bet you could never guess what we do. Yup, we practice her script. She mainly likes to do it while we’re in the car so I can not escape at any time, she is smart.  She will usually give me a piece of paper with her whole script on it and she will recite it in the voice that she has perfected. She gives me the script so that if she messes up I will correct her, or at least that’s what she is hoping for.  This has been an ongoing thing for quite a few years now so I just kind of expect it but sometimes she will use different characters to throw me off so I actually have to pay attention.

My Grandmother has become pretty popular at her local library and up at Rangeley where she does anual story tellings.  She also does story tellings at a place called Ferry Beach where she takes me and my cousins every year for a weekend in the summer.  We love going there even if we do have to listen to the same story over and over. My Grandmother has always been into that kind of history. She has used all those organizations like 23&me and ancestory.com just so she can find out more about our family history and maybe even find someone new to tell their story publicly.

Picture by Molly Flaherty