| Feature
A new wave of geneaologists
by Larry Chabot
When one thinks of Mary Wright, the first question often is: “What is she up to now?”
This woman of endless energy has launched wonderfully elaborate and very public projects that celebrate the human spirit. She’s been the force behind some of the Upper Peninsula’s truly remarkable schemes, like the forest of totem pole genealogy tree trunks that sprouted in Marquette’s Mattson Park, the Finn Fest chair project (the 2005 event brought in more than 3,000 imaginatively decorated blue-and-white chairs), fish shanty art works, and the popular Grandma Doors program, when hundreds of grandmothers—past and present—were remembered with family tributes affixed to every conceivable type of household door. Most of these peninsula-wide events, which benefitted from the input of thousands of U.P. people, ended up on display in Marquette.
So what is she up to now? The new deal is Storyline, and it’s spreading quickly through U.P. schools. “Kids and adults are encouraged to write about the ancestor or another person who influenced them greatly,” Wright said. “The theme is one of people facing and overcoming adversity, like migration for example.”
Mining Gazette reporter Garrett Neese, after interviewing Wright, wrote that those ancestors “had the sisu, the chutzpah...to meet that challenge, be more than equal to it. As a result, their descendants’ lives have been better.”
With financial help from the Michigan Humanities Council and the Finlandia Foundation, the Storyline project has so far reached nine counties in the Upper Peninsula. “But you don’t have to be from the U.P.,” Wright said. “This could involve people from all over the world because it has a universal theme.”
The brief stories, often only one paragraph, are imprinted on cotton panels obtained from hotels, motels and supply firms. Whenever possible, a photo is included. During her many personal visits to schools to coordinate the project, Wright has read a couple of hundred panels and contributed her own writeup about her grandmother.
The program premiered last year in the Chassell Township Schools. Principal George Stokero said about 100 of the district’s 270 students took part in the project by producing panels which hung on the school walls for two weeks. During this period, a big craft show drew a good-sized crowd to the school, where they encountered the kids’ historical work.
“Seven different grades were involved,” Stockero said. “We were very satisfied with the turnout.”
South Range Elementary School also had great success. All ninety-five children in Grades 4 through 6 (from a school total of 220) crafted mini-histories of chosen ancestors. Teachers Sheri Normand and Sue Destrampe ran the program, which will live on after the school year ends.
“On July 3, all the panels will be displayed at Jeffers High School in Painesdale for the school’s 100th anniversary,” Normand said.
Other participating schools include Ontonagon and Calumet. The latter school’s project involved not only students, but teachers, parents, bus drivers, cooks and other staff turning out family panels.
According to superintendent Karen Anderson, North Star Academy in Marquette produced eighty-eight panels from among its 198 students. Sixth grade teacher Mariann Federizzi coordinated the elementary school program, which had eighty-three kids making panels—100 percent participation.
“The kids were really fired up,” she said. “I did one on my own dad and this got them going. One girl found a book her grandmother had written. Another discovered that her grandmother had founded a rural bus line.”
Leslie Gardiner, who teaches literature to high school juniors and seniors, took her group to Jacobetti Veterans Home in Marquette so the kids could interview the residents there.
“They were treated just wonderfully by the veterans,” she said. “The veterans really enjoyed being interviewed by the kids. The kids then wrote up the stories for the panels and even sent thank-you notes to the veterans afterwards.”
North Star art teacher Joy Bender-Hadley’s classes helped the younger children with typing and organizing their material, worked with them on gathering and handling photographs, and transferred the work to panels using a laser printer and special software. Her crew then strung the panels on ropes along walls in the all-purpose room.
Glen Bressette, Sr., a Native American originally from the Bad River Tribe in northern Wisconsin now residing in Harvey, found out about Storyline through a parent-teacher function at North Star. His granddaughter, Chayenne Maki, honored Bressette by preparing a panel about him, and wrote one on his late mother.
“They made a video on us, too,” he said. “When I saw the panels, I didn’t know what to say. It was very emotional. I’m proud of Chayenne for what she did and proud that she chose me and my mother.”
A perusal of the eighty-eight panels displayed at North Star turned up a couple of samples by the school’s newly-created genealogists. One panel, prepared by North Star administrative assistant Stephanie Abata, spotlighted an Irish immigrant ancestor named John Condon who settled in Lake Linden, where he married and raised eight children on a copper miner’s wages.
Another sample highlighted Clara Christensen, who (despite her claim that she “led a simple life and nothing too spectacular happened”) found herself as one of twelve children when her mother married a widower with three kids and then bore nine more herself. They were “so poor that we were never affected by the Great Depression, that we never had that much to begin with...I was the only one to graduate from high school.”
In this typical example, the student spoke in the voice of the ancestor.
Yet another North Star panel featured a school dad who suffered a broken back playing football, but was able to recover through lengthy rehabilitation and exercise.
“My son says he looks up to me because I inspire him to be a better person,” he wrote.
Occasionally the teachers are stunned by the genealogical facts dug up by their students. At South Range, fifth grader Harley Eakin surprised his teacher with the news that his great-great-grandmother was none other than Maude Sincock, one of only three U.P. survivors (of a total of twenty-three U.P. men, women and children) who sailed on the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic in 1912. Mrs. Sincock went far and wide to tell her remarkable story, making her one of the Copper Country’s most well-known and esteemed residents.
“We had no idea he was related to her until he wrote the story,” Normand said.
At the Chassell school, principal George Stockero got the ball rolling by showcasing his grandmother, Norina Talerico Maki. Her family of ten was crammed into a two-bedroom home in Caspian in Iron County. Widowed early, Maki became a bookkeeper and worked until age eighty.
“She was the first and only female in her family to graduate from high school,” Stockero said. “Every Sunday night, she made spaghetti dinner for the whole family.” Up to five generations around the table.
Stockero was impressed with the Storyline concept.
“What made it so special was community members spending so much time reading and talking about the stories,” he said. “I could hear people say, ‘Oh! I remember that person’ or ‘I didn’t know that.’ This is truly a great learning experience, combining academics with community awareness. It brought a sense of pride...and just pure enjoyment.”
What will happen to the panels? Suzanne Jurva, a well-known documentary filmmaker, will document Storyline for showing to film festivals and public television stations after the opera premieres. Jurva, who worked for Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studio as research director and whose parents live at Twin Lakes in Houghton County, told Marquette Monthly that her recent work, Changing Keys, highlights guitar player Bill McLaughlin learning to play with his opposite hand after suffering from dystonia, or involuntary muscle contraction. Bruce Turner of Public TV 13 in Marquette confirmed that the program will air from 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. on July 25 and repeat at 2:30 p.m. on July 26.
The panels will also be featured at a specially-commissioned opera entitled Rockland, to be presented at Michigan Technological University’s Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts on July 15 and 17, 2011 by the Pine Mountain Music Festival organization. Based on the account of a violent copper miner’s strike in Rockland in Ontonagon County as recorded by a miner named Alfred Laakso, the story illustrates the challenges faced by immigrants in making a living under very harsh conditions, and ties in nicely with the Storyline theme.
Newspaper publisher Andy Hill of Wakefield, grandson of the miner-storyteller Alfred Laakso, had heard verbal accounts of the historic event before finally seeing a printed copy. “My grandfather was a very proud and patriotic American,” Hill said.
Through the efforts and encouragement of Northern Michigan University professor John Kiltinen, Finnish composer Jukka Linkola and librettist Jussi Tapola were commissioned to compose the story and music. In time for the opera, all of Wright’s Storyline panels will be displayed at the Rozsa Center as a most relevant complement to the opera, then turned over to the archives of the Keweenaw National Historical Park for preservation.
Wright is thrilled by the creation of the opera and its connection to the Storyline panels. As for the stories themselves, Wright said it is important that they get heard and recorded before they evaporate.
“When a person dies, a whole library shelf of books is gone,” Wright said.
She hopes the Storyline experience will create an entirely new generation of future family historians who will continue to probe their family histories.
That’s what Mary Wright has been up to lately.
MM
|
