Family Ties
I recently attended a family reunion with my maternal grandfather’s family. As a little background, my maternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother immigrated from Europe and settled in New Jersey where they raised seven sons and daughters. My grandfather, one of them, volunteered for the Air Force during World War II and was stationed in Midland, Texas, where he met my grandmother. They had three daughters and one of them married a West Texas cotton farmer’s son who had aspirations of becoming a rancher.
Because my maternal grandfather integrated himself so well into the West Texas culture, I never connected much with his New Jersey roots or family. The rest of his brothers and sisters raised their families across the nation. Today, their children and grandchildren are in all sorts of different businesses.
It was an unusual sensation to meet so many strangers with whom I shared only DNA. Yet, there had to be a reason nearly 100 strangers would gather from across the country to meet one another. I look back to the original patriarch and matriarch who both—independent of each other—came to America alone, from England in 1902 and Sweden in 1903, respectively, to begin a new life. They bucked the norms of their families and took huge risks to start something new.
I think that’s why so many of their descendants found the time and made the effort to gather. We can look backward at what they did and hope that we have something of that in us. They established a legacy of bravery, dedication, and love (they were married for 55 years and died within three months of each other).
The obvious next thought is to consider what I am doing to create a legacy in my own family? In the cowboy world, there are good opportunities to hand down unique skills with horses and cattle—and sometimes even some land. But I think what’s more important is to pass down a legacy of virtue: knowing right from wrong, standing up for good, and resisting evil. No matter our circumstance in life, it’s never too early or too late to consider what kind of legacy we will leave those who follow us.