The Record of Sorrows, a Living Memory of Death
By Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, 2018
Listen to this edited audio piece through OHMA’s SoundCloud channel
My mother was a genealogist, and the recorded data that she inscribed on her genealogy charts she derived from a variety of sources. But of all the cemetery fieldtrip notes and correspondence with shirttail cousins that I pored over in the files that she left to me after she died, I had yet to discover her source for the names of the 12 children born by my great-great-great-grandmother, Nancy C. Daily Lyle. A year after my mother’s death, family members assembled at Lake Texoma to spread my mother’s and father’s ashes. My brother and his wife drove down from Seattle, and my cousin Tony who was quite fond of my mother, drove up from Houston. He arrived with three boxes, containing a trove of family photograph albums, along with two ancient family relics, the Lyle and the Jackson Family Bibles.
This audio file offers a brief excerpt of the much longer story that my cousin told me about his coming into possession of these Bibles, their decades of interment in “chicken boxes,” and his decision to vouchsafe them to me. The person he mentions as giving him the Bibles is our maternal grandmother, Minnie Lee Jackson Park. But we called her Minnie Mo. In the center pages of the Bible, what my cousin calls, the Record of Sorrows, Nancy C. Daily Lyle has inscribed nine names, attesting to not only the physical labor of childbirth, but the compounding emotional weight of a mother’s losses.
Margaret Elin Lyle, died September 6th, 1843, Aged 11 months and 23 days
John Wesley Lyle died January 17th, 1844, Aged 2 months and 23 days
Harriet Josephine Lyle died June 1st, 1845, Aged 2 months & 15 days
James Oliver Lyle Mar died June 13th, 1846, Aged 2 months and 27 days
Charles Wellington Lyle died May 21st, 1851, Aged 13 months & 27 days
Sarah Elizabeth Lyle died September 21st, 1852, Aged 5 months 10 days
Catherine Emeline Lyle died November 2nd, 1856, Aged twelve months 21 days
Albert Galitan Lyle died July 26th, 1858, Aged 9 months and 14 days
[and, finally]
Nancy C. Lyle (mother) died May 31st, 1874
[likely written by one of her three surviving children]
How my foremother managed the steadiness of hand year after year to inscribe so many beloved names and dates of death onto the center page of that Bible is beyond me, but her memory claims me, and she compels me to find out how her losses have shaped my own understanding of birth and death.
Interview Soundtrack: “Death Came” by Lucinda Williams, from the album, The Ghosts of Highway 20
Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, ethnographer, photographer and life-long learner comes to the OHMA 2017 cohort from the Columbia University School of General Studies. Graduating summa cum laude with an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, her research of her family’s archive of 19th century documents and genealogy records, literature and photographs culminated in an auto-ethnographic thesis on indigenous identity and belonging entitled “The Indigenous Uncanny: An Ethnography of Erasure and the Resurgence of Chickasaw Identity.” She has presented her work to both native and non-native audiences, at gatherings of her fellow citizens in Chickasaw Nation and at academic conferences concerned with public history.
Ms. Gooding Silverwood seeks to apply the skills and ethical perspectives from the OHMA program to a prospective project “What Makes Us Chickasaw?” By posing questions about indigenous identity to Chickasaw citizens and persons of African ancestry who are the descendents of Chickasaw Freedpeople she hopes to further dialogues about non-juridical forms of belonging and reparative pathways that might address the historic harms of her Chickasaw Nation’s slaveholding history.
Along with her continued research of indigenous issues, Ms. Gooding Silverwood academic focus also extends to more personal projects. At the 2017 Summer Intensive on Oral History and Aging[1] sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR)[2] Ms. Gooding Silverwood had the opportunity to present and receive feedback on a proposed project that draws from her experiences as caregiver during the final year of her mother’s life. She is excited to join the OHMA program and looks forward to learning more about how to incorporate photography and other visual material with end-of-life narratives and intergenerational storytelling for the co-construction of family life histories.
[1] http://www.ccohr.incite.columbia.edu/about-the-summer-institute/