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| This ancestral chart was developed by one of my first cousins. It includes some two dozen surnames, some of people well over a dozen generations ago. |
For much of my life I thought of myself as being half Yoder and half Nisly (my mother's maiden name). I assumed that by tracing my paternal history back to Christian and Barbara Yoder (who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1742), and my maternal ancestry back to immigrant Christian Nisly (who arrived here in 1804 as an unaccompanied sixteen-year-old) that I would have the key elements of my ancestral story.
Which was naive, of course, as each of us has a multitude of generational lines to be pursued and celebrated.
In a patriarchal culture sons get to pass on their father's surnames and are seen as the main characters in the story, while daughters take on the surnames of their spouses and tend to be regarded as lesser players. Some couples attempt to partly rectify this by adopting hyphenated last names, and it would indeed be more accurate to identify myself as Harvey Yoder-Nisly-Troyer-Miller-Slabaugh-Hochstetler-Gerber-Bontrager-Esch-Kauffman-Swartzentruber-Gingerich-Stutzman-Lauver-Wert, etc., though that would be overly cumbersome. But we do need to find ways of incorporating the stories of both men and women in our ancestry.
The fan chart above of my Yoder and Nisly forbears does include the names of the mothers in my heritage, but we tend to know far less about them than we do about some of their husbands and fathers.
I'd love to learn more about the long line of mothers in my ancestral chart, knowing they have contributed just as much to my DNA as my father and my grandfathers (and actually slightly more, in that males inherit a large X chromosome from their mother and a smaller Y chromosome from their father). But my really important questions are "How have the mothers in my lineage contributed to the faith and values I've inherited from my ancestors? What were the formative experiences that shaped their lives, and mine? In what special ways did they influence the children they carried, gave birth to, nursed, nurtured to adulthood and continued to profoundly influence throughout their lives?"
With Mother's Day approaching, I'm reminded of the debt of gratitude I owe to all of these unnamed mothers whose stories I may never know.
I do feel blessed by what I know of my own mother Mary Nisly's story, born in rural Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1904, the ninth child of devoted parents Eli and Fannie (Troyer) Nisly. Her father, Eli Nisly, was a beloved bishop of their church. Her mother, Fannie, had lost her mother at a very young age, and as a 19-year-old moved from Indiana to Kansas to be a housekeeper for Abraham, a widower whose wife had left him with numerous children to care for, one of them being her future husband, Eli. So this is how two motherless young people, Eli and Fannie, met and eventually married and had 13 children of their own, one of them being my mother.
My parents married when mom was 21 and my dad, Ben, was 20. After working on my grandfather Dan Yoder's farm near Thomas, Oklahoma, they travelled some 200 miles by team and wagon from Oklahoma to Hutchinson, Kansas in the dead of winter, where they settled down and started their own family.
My mom had only a sixth-grade education, but she was an avid reader and a lifelong learner. She always encouraged us to work hard and to do our best in school, and managed to have put out two gardens every year, canned and frozen tons of food for her family, raised canaries, grown lots of flowers, constantly entertained guests from the church and visitors from out of town, and become a mother to numerous foster children, besides caring for her own family. My next younger sister, child number nine, was a motherless foster child who came to us at four weeks of age and was adopted by my parents.
I never knew my father's mother, Elizabeth, who died giving birth to her fourth child when my dad was only four years old, leaving him motherless until his father remarried when he was eight. And I have only faint memories of my grandmother Fannie, who passed away when I was six years old.
I often wonder what I am missing by knowing so little about the life stories of the multitudes of other good mothers in past generations. I'm sure each one represents a priceless biography of life experiences I could learn from and pass on to my descendants.
Happy Mother's Day!
