Katie Wynn

“I could tell lots of stories”

Whatever you call it, family narrative, family stories, “family saga,” (Boatright 1973), or

“family novel” (Wilson 1991), this form of narrative serves an important function in family and

cultural life. Family narratives tie families together, entertain, comfort, pass on tradition, present

a selected image of the family, express cultural patterns, and inform individual identity. Starting

from the history of the genre within folklore and an exploration of the definition of family

narrative, I will investigate the functions and evaluative elements of my family‟s folklore. Out

of nearly two hours of recording, I have transcribed three stories that I felt were significant and

representative of my family‟s narratives to analyze. The stories are “Bob Johnson,” “Grammom

and Cal,” and “santificationflippityflop.” I want to explore not only the stories themselves, but

the wider storytelling traditions and contexts in which my family‟s narratives are told, how my

family narratives fit into Zeitlin et al‟s family narrative subgenres, and the interplay between my

family‟s narratives and my personal narrative of my identity.

Though the transcripts are available at the end of the paper, here are brief summaries of

all three narratives. “Bob Johnson” is a story about my maternal great-grandfather. The

narrative covers Bob Johnson‟s background and his success as the sales and advertising director

of Time Magazine when the magazine first started out. The heart of the narrative is a story about

how Bob Johnson made Joe, the lowly paper boy at Time Magazine, sit down and talk to him to

find out how Joe was doing. “Grammom and Cal” is about how my maternal grandmother found

love again after being a widow for many years. Grammom had a chance encounter with an old

classmate who was married to Cal. After the women died, Grammom wrote Cal a condolences

letter and soon he began to court her. Eventually, he asked her to marry him, but she said no

because they were on vacation at the time and she didn‟t want to be swayed by the romance of

the location. She did say yes when they got back home. The story also references the fact that

Grammom also said no to her first husband when he first asked and only later agreed to marry

him. “Santificationflippityflop” is a short story about how a little boy in the family a few

generations back made a funny mistake at a party. He had been coached to say “No, thank you,

I‟ve had a sufficiency, thank you” when he was full, but forgot and ended up saying “I‟ve had a

santificationflippityflop, thank you.” Ever since then, “santificationflippityflop” has been used

by family members to indicate their fullness.

In 1958, Mody Boatright proposed that the family saga (what is now called family

narrative) was a form of folklore (Boatright 1973:124). Despite his early challenge to folklorists

to see family sagas as a folklore genre which needed to be studied, family narrative studies have

been largely underdeveloped in the field of folklore (Wilson 1991:129; Zeitlin et all 1982:11).

Though they have been accepted as a folklore genre, a process that took over a decade, after half

a century only a couple dozen works had been dedicated to the subject (Roush and Zimmerman

1994).

One of the main reasons that folklorists were slow to study family narratives was because

despite Boatright‟s article they didn‟t see family narratives as folklore. The debate for the

inclusion of family narratives in the field paralleled that about personal narratives. Stahl pointed

out, “Part of the reason for this neglect is the nontraditional content of most personal narratives”

(Stahl1977a:5). Persuasively, Stahl argued that there were four reasons for the inclusion of

personal narratives in folklore. She said personal narratives were folklore “as examples of

folkloric performance, as representatives of an established oral storytelling tradition, as narrative

embodiments of traditional attitudes, and as recognizable items in their tellers‟ repertoires”

(Stahl 1977a:6). Stahl went on to say “There is much about any one personal narrative that is

traditional; there is much more that is traditional than innovative” (Stahl 1977b:10).

This need to justify family narrative‟s inclusion in folklore is behind William Wilson‟s

assertion that folklorists have studied the more traditional aspects of family narratives

(1991:130). For example, Steven Zeitlin said that folklorist have typically only studied family

folklore, including narratives, in terms of genre or a specific family group (1980:21). The

validation of family narrative as a folklore genre is probably also why so many folklorists have

emphasized the artistic element in family narrative (e.g. Stahl 1977a: 7; Stahl 1977b:19; Wilson

1991:135; Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:2,150; Zeitlin 1980:21). For example, Zeitlin called

family narrative “history transformed into verbal art” (1980:21) and Wilson said they are

“artistic representations” of family history (1991:144). Finally, folklorists have argued that

family narrative can be reveling about the wider culture: “It contains clues to our national

character and insights into our family structure” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:2). Arguments

like Stahl‟s, the genre focus, the artistic emphasis, and the cultural factors have all led family

narrative to become an accepted genre of folklore.

As the discussion above suggested, family narratives have developed alongside and

intertwined with family folklore and personal narrative folklore scholarship (e.g. Stahl 1977a;

Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982). Both genres have had a lot of influence on folklorists‟

understanding of family narrative. Though personal narrative studies have been very influential

on family narrative studies, there is one important difference between family narratives and

personal narratives: the audience. With the personal narratives the storyteller tries to find new

audiences to tell her story to (Stahl 1977b:25). Family narratives are just the opposite; the stories

are mostly meant to be told to a closed group.

One very important book for family narrative studies and for this paper is Steve Zeitlin,

Holly C. Baker, and Amy J. Kotkin‟s A Celebration of American Family Folklore. Their book

has become one of the most references works on family folklore (e.g. Toelken 1996:114; Roush

1994:63; Yocom 1982:254) as it one of the only books dedicated to exploring the genre of family

folklore. Though about family folklore in general, the majority of the book is devoted to family

stories and sayings. The book grew out of a family folklife tent that was part of the

Smithsonian‟s Festival of American Folklife from 1974 to 1977.

Another important publication on family narratives was the special edition of Southern

Folklore: Family Folklore Studies 1994. The edition was dedicated to exploring the concept of

family which is crucial to understanding family narrative. The articles approached the idea of

family from a number of different ways including family shaped by emotional bonds, by musical

bonds, and by subscriptions to the same magazine (Danielson 1994). Their discussion was very

interesting, but for the purposes of this paper I stuck with the more traditional definition of

family (blood and marriage). Importantly, the articles made me realize that my idea of who my

family is has not been static. Who I consider myself most closely related to has changed for me

as I interacted more or less with certain branches/members of the family, traveled, lived in

different places, or sorted through different inherited belongings. This in turn affected which

narratives were more “active” verses “inactive” parts of my (and my family‟s) repertoire (Stahl

1977:24). I tried to select only the stories that were mostly continually active to avoid that

dilemma.

The most helpful discussion for my understanding of family was Barre Toelken‟s in The

Dynamics of Folklore. Toelken laid out three levels of family: the immediate family (nuclear

family), the horizontal family (cousins, aunts, uncles), and the vertical family (past generations)

(1996:101-02). Further, each level of family can have its own family narratives that may or may

not overlap (Toelken 1996:101). I have to confess that when I think of family narratives I tend

to think almost exclusively about the vertical family. I didn‟t even consider asking for the stories

from my horizontal or immediate family when I set out to interview my parents about family

narratives. I realize now that I thought of those as personal narratives, which they are (as are a

number of the family‟s narratives), but they are also part of the repertoire of narratives I draw

upon to shape my idea of family. So even though Zeitlin et al said, “we have considered family

stories any incident retold by one family member about another over a period of years”

(1982:10), I consider personal stories told in the family storytelling context to be family stories.

One final note on family: for the most part, my horizontal family serves as a vehicle to talk about

our common vertical family, so there are very few family stories I tell that involve the horizontal

family and none of them will be discussed in this essay.

How then to define the second half of the term? Narrative, like text and performance, has

a very wide meaning in folklore today. There are three ways that I will use the word in relation

to my family‟s narratives. Primarily, this paper focuses on a more traditional definition:

narratives as the specific stories that my family tells about particular people or experiences. The

second way that narratives will be used in this paper is a more recent understanding of the term:

my personal narrative that I use to, in part, constitute my understanding of my family and me.

These two versions are not mutually exclusive; the narrative I tell to and of myself and my

family is informed by my family‟s narratives. I interpret, re-assemble, and retell the narratives in

ways that make them fit into my own view of myself and my family. Finally, I use the term

metanarrative, which is the narrative that our family narratives taken together construct about our

family (Stephen and McCallum 1998:3). Succinctly then, for this paper narratives are both the

discrete stories themselves and the overarching stories they project and that I use to represent my

family and myself.

A second important aspect of the narrative section was hinted of above: family narratives

are, as A Celebration of American Family Folklore said, “personalized and often creative

distillation of experience, worked and reworked over time… (family narrative is) carefully

selected and elaborated through the years, tailored to the demands of the present” (Zeitlin,

Kotkin, and Baker 1982:2). That family narratives have been modified over time is a given, but

that is counter in many ways to an emotional understanding of family narrative as true stories of

the family‟s history (Boatright 1973: 124). For folklorists, the historical accuracy is not the

point: “its significance in this context does not depend on its accuracy as a biographical event”

(Boatright 1973:129). Even William Wilson who said he viewed family narratives as fictional

emphasized the emotional value as one of the significant aspects of family narratives (1991:134).

Therefore, my use of family narratives in this paper refers to those stories that are told by my

immediate family about the immediate and vertical family, and which are regarded as true, with

the intellectual understanding that the stories have been modified to meet some expectation.

While I want to mostly focus on the actual family narratives told, I think it is also

important to give some background and context to my family, our storytelling traditions, and the

stories themselves. All the stories I selected were from my mom‟s side of the family. I did this

for two reasons. First, given the constraints of this paper the analysis was shorter when I only

had to deal with one family‟s background, storytelling traditions, and one metanarrative.

Second, I know more of my mom‟s family narratives than my dad‟s. This is for a number of

reasons. My mom‟s family values its history; one branch even has a formal family book. My

mom‟s are relatives physically and genealogically closer than my dad‟s and we have had more

socializing opportunities. Plus my mother herself is very talkative. During a lull in the interview

she said the quote I used as the title of this paper, “I could tell lots of stories” (Johnson 2011).

My dad‟s side of the family lives further away and is less closely related to me personally (no

first cousins or grandparents). The main narrative of my dad‟s is my grandmother‟s experience

in WWII and her move to the US. Plus, my dad claims that he doesn‟t have “great stories”

(Wynn 2011), though he still managed to talk for an hour during the interview. Practically, what

this means is that I have heard more narratives about my vertical family from my mom‟s side

than my dad‟s.

My family (and especially my mom) tells family narratives quite often, but they are

usually prompted in some manner. This impetus can be a birthday party, funeral, or wedding

that numerous family members attend, visits among family, going through personal belongings

from the past, or simply dinner conversation. According to Zeitlin et al, these times for

recounting family stories are fairly typical “storytelling in American families takes place at

family reunions, at holidays, across the table at the evening meal. The very predictability of

these occasions helps render them relaxing and enjoyable” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, Baker 1982:18).

As I already mentioned, many of the stories that we tell were originally personal stories

that have gotten absorbed into the family‟s set of narratives. Further, my mother‟s stories about

herself have informed my understanding of her and her side of the family. This inclusion

required me to consider Amy Shuman‟s question of who has the right to tell another person‟s

story (2005:9). When the people who the story is about are present, I usually ask them to tell the

story. I hadn‟t ever thought of that in terms of entitlement to the story, rather that hearing Cal

tell the “Grammom and Cal” story or my mom tell about her New York City adventures makes

the stories more exciting and present. But often I am separated from those people by geography

and time. I cannot ask my dead Grandy to talk about eating sundaes with her girlfriends.

However, as a substitute I don‟t ask my dad to tell that narrative, though after 26 years of

marriage to my mother he knows the story too. It is mom‟s family narrative to tell and,

eventually, mine.

Sad stories or stories of hardship are not the most active in my mom‟s family narrative

repertoire. In fact, I know of just two: Grampy‟s infant son dying in his arms on the way to the

hospital and Grampy‟s father‟s bad relationship with his mother. Further, I have only heard

these a few times each and even then they were told as very brief and not fleshed out narratives.

On my dad‟s side of the family there are more narratives with unhappy tones, specifically of my

grandmother‟s experience in Germany during WWII and my uncle‟s mental illness. Again,

though, these narratives are told less frequently and with sparse detail. In contrast, Zeitlin et al

said that stories of survivors, family feuds, and disasters are quite popular family narrative

themes: “Family members who triumph over poverty and hardship are often remembered in

family traditions. Stories about struggles for food, shelter, or clothing are told in every

generation” (1982:46). The contrast between what Zeitlin et al said is common and my family‟s

narratives points both to differences in lifestyles and to what is tellable and untellable for my

mom‟s family. Namely, my mother‟s side of the family doesn‟t like to retain stories about sad or

hard times, but instead prefers to emphasize better times.

Zeitlin et al‟s concept of the “character principle” emphasized for me something very

important about my family narratives. I have never met many of the family members who are

featured in our stories but they are emotionally important people to me. Yet what I know about

Gandy, Hi-Hi, Bob Johnson, and all the rest is not a full picture of their personalities. As Zeitlin

et al said, family narratives “enable us to simplify the complexities of a family member‟s

personality into an easily remembered, easily communicated narrative (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and

Baker 1982:14-15). Thus, there was undoubtedly much more to Bob Johnson than him being a

friendly guy who was genuinely interested in everybody and had a prestigious career, but that is

the sum total of my knowledge of him. This is what my family has chosen to pass down in

narrative about Bob Johnson. Despite this aspect of simplification, I still feel as though I know

Bob Johnson even though he died long before I was born, and that feeling is due entirely to

family narrative. So, as William Wilson so eloquently said, “Now only the stories remain. But

they do remain” (Wilson 1991:148).

Why were some incidents from my family‟s history retained through stories while so

many others are untold and forgotten? Family narratives are “retrospective compositions”

(Oring 1987:241). As with all folklore, if family narratives are no longer meaningful to the

family then they become “inactive” while the ones that are still seen as pertinent are “active”

parts of the family‟s narrative repertoire (Stahl 1977:24). This has led folklorists to argue that

family narratives need to serve some kind of function, hold some kind of meaning for the family.

Family stories have some obvious functions: to pass on family values, history, and culture from

one generation to the next (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:19). Boatright said most simply that

“for a tale to enter into oral tradition and survive, it must afford emotional satisfaction to the

hearers” (1973:125). More elaborately, Zeitlin et al proposed that family narratives “hold

secrets- about the past, or course, but also about the way we chose to think of ourselves, about

the dreams we project backward on our ancestors concerning what we would like them to have

been, and what we need from them now” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:8). Much of this

thinking comes from William Labov and Joshua Waletzky‟s concept of “evaluations,” which

Stahl discussed in relation to personal narrative (Stahl 1977b:20). She said Labov and Waletzky

believed that stories needed to have to have a point or they would be incomplete narratives (Stahl

1977b:20). Stahl debated whether this point was conscious or unconscious, but agreed that

personal narratives need to have some aspect to “make the stories significant, give them

meaning” (Stahl 1977b:20). The stories that have been retained by my family therefore must be

those that have the most emotional and psychological meaning for my family, even if that is just

that they make us laugh.

Some narratives are left out of the family‟s narrative repertoire while others are

incorporated because of how they fit into the family‟s metanarrative. Metanarratives, according

to Stephens and McCallum, are:

(T)he implicit and usually invisible ideologies, systems, and assumptions which operate globally

in a society to order knowledge and experience. The major narrative domains which involve

retold stories all, in the main, have the function of maintaining conformity to socially determined

and approved patterns of behavior, which they do by offering positive role models, proscribing

undesirable behavior, and affirming the culture‟s ideologies, systems, and institutions. (1998:3-4)

I took the idea of metanarrative down from the societal level of the family level. In my family,

the narratives are used to create a metanarrative of a family full of people who are intelligent,

kind, hard working, educated, business savvy, well-to-do, and like to laugh (even at themselves).

Even Stephens and McCallum‟s emphasis on the controlling power of the narratives has can be

seen in me because after hearing these narratives for all these years, I now aspire to be like Bob

Johnson, Grady, and Grammom.

In A Celebration of American Family Folklore, the authors looked at “prominent themes

in American culture” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:3). The book broke family narratives into

10 specific categories: heroes, rogues, mischief makers, survivors, innocents, migrations, lost

fortunes, courtships, family feuds, and supernatural happenings. I found it interesting to see how

these genres fit with my family‟s narratives. I found that I could think of examples for a few of

the genres (listed below), but most of them I had to pull from my memories of narratives I have

only heard a few times. We do have immigration stories, but two of the four of those are more

facts then fleshed out narratives. According to Zeitlin et al, these stories usually follow a set

threefold pattern (1982:62) and are considered the beginning of the family history (1982:68).

While most of our narratives do focus exclusively on the immigrants and their descendents, they

generally don‟t hold to the three step pattern. We also have only one “rogue” story: Grampy

made bathtub gin during prohibition. However, the narratives about this emphasize the

excitement of the parties more than the illegal alcohol. For “innocents,” there is my mom‟s first

drinking experience, which is told both because it‟s funny and as a cautionary tale, those being

two of the genre requirements (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:52). The closest thing we have

to a “supernatural happenings” narrative is on my dad‟s side: my dad saw Saint Nicholas as a

boy. My family narratives include numerous stories of courtship and romance. However, Zeitlin

et al focused on what they said are the most typical narratives: first encounter narratives. This

type of courting story is not typical in my family‟s narratives. The “Grammom and Cal”

narrative discussed above is the only one that clearly contains the first meeting story and could

probably be categorize under the subcategory Courtship Stories: Destiny (Zeitlin 1980:24).

Importantly, even though I can place some of our family narratives into these genres, those

genres are not how my family would naturally organize the stories. For us, who the story is

about and what it says about that person are more important than if the story is an “innocents” or

“courtship” narrative. So even though I can apply etic genres to the narratives, they do not

consistently correlate with our emic genres.

Out of an hour of stories by my mom, I selected just three to transcribe. They are “Bob

Johnson,” “Grammom and Cal,” and “santificationflippityflop.” I chose the first and the second

narratives because they were representative of the types of narratives told in my family. I chose

the third narrative because it is the origin story for a popular family phrase. Interestingly, the

narratives that I transcribed from my mother are not the exact narratives I was expecting to hear.

The stories I recorded are all ones I had heard before, but different variants. Most of the

difference can probably be explained in one of three ways. First, no two narratives are the same

and this was simply a unique performance by my mother (e.g. Bauman 1984; Lord 1988).

Second, the storytelling situation was unnatural. I interviewed her using a microphone, a

recorder, and the expectation that this was a class assignment. Further, I asked her to tell me all

the family stories she could think of starting the furthest back instead of the typical natural

prompts of a person, theme, or object. This situation also probably caused my mother to tell the

stories as though she was talking to an outsider because she gave much more detail than I

thought was typical. I tried to correct this partly though the interview when I realized what was

happening by asking her to tell the stories as she would normally to a family member. After that

some of the “extra” details dropped off, but not all. This brings me to the third reason for the

differences: they could have been perceived on my part because of my memory and my

storytelling style. I have been away from home for nearly seven years and while I still hear

family stories from my mom on the phone and when I‟m on vacation, the frequency is a lot less

than it was during my childhood. I now mostly remember the bare bones of the stories, or at

least the ones that are most important to me, and tell my versions of family narratives based on

that. I also tend to tell stories in a much more to-the-point manner than my mother does.

“Bob Johnson” is a story that my mom tells and also one that my step-grandfather (Cal of

the “Grammom and Cal” narrative) knows. It is essentially about a very successful business man

who is still a decent guy genuinely interested in everyone he encounters. That Cal also tells a

similar story that he heard when he later worked from the same company is seen as a validation

of this narrative by my family.

When examining the “Bob Johnson” narrative, I found Stanley Brandes‟s article “Family

Misfortune Stories in American Folklore” especially helpful even though my family does not

have lost fortune stories. Brandes said the misfortune narratives were to help the families cope

with the anxiety caused by their “failure” (as deemed by society) to move up on the social ladder

(Brandes 1975:14). Brandes believed that the anxiety was caused by the American belief that

“economic achievement and social position are dependent on a person‟s intelligence, hard work,

thrift, and a judicious mixture of similarly oriented qualities usually associated with the

Protestant ethic” which butted up against the reality of rigid social classes (1975:5). In short

these stories deal with the pursuit of the American dream and therefore illustrate Stahl‟s

argument that narratives are often “embodiments of traditional attitudes” (Stahl 1977a:6).

After I read Stanley Brandes‟s article it became apparent that many of the narratives told

by my mom‟s side of the family, including the “Bob Johnson” story, are nearly opposite of the

white working and lower middle class families misfortune stories described by Brandes (1975:7).

Like those Brandes‟s surveyed, my mom‟s family is also white, but was primarily middle, upper

middle, and even upper class. While I enjoy family narratives like this partially because I enjoy

having prestigious ancestors, an analysis of these narratives points to perhaps a different

motivation for their continued active status in our family narrative repertoire. The “Bob

Johnson” narrative that I transcribed from my mother emphasizes that he was “a nice, friendly

guy” (Johnson 2011). Other narratives from her side of the family continue this theme with

stories about intelligent, hard working, good men. I believe that while these qualities are

admired by my family in general, they may have also been emphasized in order to justify the

wealth my family processed. I do not think it can be complete coincidence that the qualities

emphasized by these family narratives of a family that has achieved the “American dream”

correspond to the qualities associated with attaining the “American dream.” Though I have not

told my mother this theory, I think it might apply especially to her, who is the storyteller for me

of most of these stories, because she is a social worker and may feel anxious about the economic

differences between herself and her clients. My mom‟s and my reasons differing reasons

emphasizes Zeitlin‟s point that each individual interprets their family stories differently so that it

remains meaningful to them (1973:144). It further illustrates that family narrative deal with “the

dreams we project backward on our ancestors concerning what we would like them to have

been” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:8).

I included the “Grammom and Cal” narrative because it is important to my understanding

of my grandmother. This narrative speaks to my grandmother‟s personality. It demonstrates that

she was kind because she took the time write a nice letter to a near stranger. The narrative

illustrates her generosity as mother and grandmother who took her family with her on her

vacations. Finally, it shows that Grammom was stubborn and thought things through before

making a decision. This narrative is also a parallel of the narrative of her courtship with her first

husband, Robert Johnson. She also said no to the first time he proposed, a fact my mother

alludes to at the end of the transcription. I can‟t think of Grammom saying no to the one

husband without remembering that she also said no to the other.

The second reason I chose to transcribe this narrative is because it is an example of a

family romance narrative. I am fond of romance, so I often request to hear romantic family

narratives, which is probably why I know more of them than any other type. Zeitlin‟s article on

family courtship helped me examine these family narratives. He said that narratives are one of

the few ways that modern Americans can express ideas that have now been deemed silly, taboo,

or otherwise untellable (Zeitlin 1980:27). Specifically, he said that courtship stories reflect “a

body of folk ideas regarding love and marriage” that includes romantic ideas like love at first

sight (Zeitlin 1980:27). This applies to the “Grammom and Cal” narrative because it gives me

an example of a happy and successful romance, even though this particular one begins when the

players are in their seventies. I believe that I request and tell family narratives like “Grammom

and Cal” in order to defy the growing statistics of divorce and unhappy marriages and prove that

in my family love beats the odds. Telling these stories is a way of me saying that I think I will

be able to beat the odds too, without being so blatant that I am rubbing it in the face of those who

did not.

The last narrative, “santificationflippityflop” is about a family saying. Unlike the other

narratives which are told more on special occasions or at a prompt, the term

santificationflippityflop is employed fairly regularly at meal times by my family when they feel

especially full. Zeitlin et al said family saying often act as “passwords which affirm the ties of

shared experience. They are also filled with meaning because the expression often carries a

humorous piece of family history along with it” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982:146). The full

narrative behind santificationflippityflop is only recounted when explaining the expression to

outsiders. When I use the term santificationflippityflop, I do not usually consciously think of the

story behind the saying unless I need to explain it to whoever I am with. However, when I say

“I‟ve had a santificationflippityflop!” I immediately feel connected to my family no matter

where I am or who I‟m with. Santificationflippityflop is an important part of my inheritance. As

Kim Garrett said, “These sayings have been inherited along with blue eyes, blond hair, and the

grandfather clock” (1961:280).

Jan Roush nicely explained the interplay between family narrative and the construction of

identity. She said that family folklore “help(s) shape us not only as individuals but as individuals

within a larger, familiar unit… (and) allows us to see ourselves as part of a continuous line of

kinship that stretches from the distant past into the future” (1994:61). This is a cyclical process:

the narratives in large part constitute my understanding of my family, but I have also fit the

family narratives told to me into my understanding and expectations of my family. Further,

these family narratives also inform my understanding of myself. My actions make up part of

who I am, but a large part of my identity is constituted by narrative, especially the narratives that

I tell.

When exchanging genealogy with people, I usually construct it by taking facts gleamed

from family narratives and then weave them into my own narrative of my family. It usually goes

something like this:

I come from two very different backgrounds. My dad said my mom married down when she

married him. On my mom‟s side I have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, founded

Albany, New York, had jewelry that when sold and the profits divided was enough to buy a

small sailboat and build an addition on the house, was one of the founders of Time Magazine,

was an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and one was even one of the highest paid men in

America for awhile. My dad‟s side came over as indentured servants from Wales. They

resurfaced somewhere in Mississippi before almost being disowned for moving so far north into

Yankee land i.e. Louisville, Kentucky.

Of course I am generously editing my family‟s history when I tell this story. Inconsistently, on

my mom‟s side, my great-grandmother came from a Boston Irish family that wasn‟t well-to-do.

Also inconsistent with my narrative is that my dad‟s mom came over from Germany were she

had been well educated and whose dad was a scientist. Further, my paternal great-aunt has

uncovered interesting facts for that side of the family that involve the Titanic, Lincoln‟s

daughter-in-law, and a progressive Supreme Court judge. Why have I created such as caricature

of my family? I enjoy that I have prominent Yankee ancestors and so I emphasize that aspect. It

makes me feel like I have a claim on New England. I also enjoy the contrast between my mom

and my dad‟s sides, which is why I simplify my dad‟s story. However, I have told this narrative

so many times that I have to really think to remember the exceptions; in a very real way this

narrative has become how I understand my family.

Sometimes, however, my narratives are not perfectly in line with the typical family

narratives. For example, besides all the happy narratives I use to remember my grandmother,

like “Grammom and Cal,” I also uncharacteristically tell a sad narrative. The stories of her

dementia, like when she stopped remembering who I was, are important to my internal narrative

that is how I remember my grandmother. Stories about Grammom‟s dementia are just as

important to me as the stories of her courtships because that was my experience with her.

Further, the dementia narrative is important to me because it is a narrative that I see connecting

my grandmother, my mother, and me; a feared narrative that I am taking from the past and

projecting into the future.

Family narratives are used to bind families together over time and space, to pass on

family values, and to represent ones family to oneself and to an outside audience. They are also

told for entertainment or sentimental purposes (or both). Family narratives are not static though;

they are altered to have continuing relevance in the present and to aid in the construction of

personal identities. Analyzing the narratives and storytelling traditions from my mom‟s family

illustrated their many meanings and influences for my family and me. Many of the conclusions,

such as our metanarrative, the American dream scenario, and constructing an alternative

narrative for relationships, were not aspects I had recognized or consciously articulated before.

In short, I think it is fair to say that family narratives have played a vital role for my family and

me. I will end by quoting Kim Garrett‟s opening paragraph of “Family Stories and Saying” in

full because it articulates so well the importance of family narratives for my family.

Every family that recognizes itself as a unit has its own taboos, legends, and

traditions. It even has its own language which is built on shared experiences and

expresses common values and goals. The members of such a family are fortunate

because they have that deep-rooted security that can come only from a sense of

unity and continuity. Family lore, like other folklore, not only mirrors the group‟s

habits, motivations, and aspirations, but also acts as a cement that wields

individual members of the group together in time as well as in space. 1961:275.

Works Cited

Bauman, Richard. 1975. Verbal Art as Performance. American Anthropologist 77:290-311.

Boatright, Mody. 1973. Family Saga as a Form of Folklore. In Mody Boatright, Folklorist: A

Collection of Essays, ed., Speck, Earnest B., pp 124-144. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Brandes, Stanley H. 1975. Family Misfortune Stories in American Folklore. Journal of American

Folklore Institute 12(1):5-18.

Danielson, Larry, ed. 1994. Family Folklore Studies 1994. Southern Folklore 51(1).

Garrett, Kim. 1961. Family Stories and Sayings. In Singers and Storytellers, ed. Mody

Boatright, Wilson Hudson, and Allen Maxwell, pp. 273-281. Dallas: Southern Methodist

University Press.

Lord, Parry B. 1988. The Singer of Tales. 2nd

ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Oring, Elliot. 1987. Generating Lives: The Construction of an Autobiography. Journal of

Folklore Research 24(3):241-262.

Roush, Jan. 1994. On Teaching Family Folklore: Some Cautionary Notes. Southern Folklore

51(1):61-71.

----- and Thomas Zimmerman. 1994. A Selected Bibliography of Family Folklore. Southern

Folklore 51(1): 77-85.

Shuman, Amy. 2005. Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Stahl, Sandra K. D. 1977a. Introduction. Journal of the Folklore Institute 14(1/2):5-8.

-----. 1977b. The Personal Narrative as Folklore. Journal of the Folklore Institute 14(1/2):9-30.

Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. 1998. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional

Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Toelken, Barre. 1996. The Dynamic of Folklore. Logan: Utah State University.

Wilson, William A. 1991. The 1990 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture: Narratives: The Family

Novel. Western Folklore 50(2): 127-149.

Yocom, Margaret R. 1982. Family Folklore and Oral History Interviews: Strategies for

Introducing a Project to One‟s Own Relatives. Western Folklore 41(4): 251-274.

Zeitlin, Steven J. 1980. “An Alchemy of Mind”: The Family Courtship Story. Western Folklore

39(1):17-33.

-----, Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker. 1982. A Celebration of American Family

Folklore. New York: Pantheon Books.

Transcription

The interview this transcription was made from took place on April 23rd

at my great aunt‟s house

in Washington D.C. Present at the interview was my mother, Carol Schilthuis Johnson, my

father, Thomas Joe Wynn, and myself. The transcriptions are all from my mother‟s narratives.

() indicates it was said very quickly compared to normal speech

Bold means it was emphasized by volume or tone of voice

Italics means the word was drawn out

Underling means the voice was raised in imitation

… indicates an especially long space

[ ] background information

Bob Johnson

[45:32] Right, so, my dad‟s dad was Robert Livingston Johnson. And he went to Yale. And…

but then enlisted in the army, I think, during World War I and missed his graduation. He, he left

before his, he graduated. By a semester or something like that. And um, when he came back,

he…didn‟t go back to school but he… (anyway, I, I don‟t know what he did immediately) but at,

at a certain point he, and I think pretty soon after that… was… started working with this group

of other Yale grads and they were putting together a … new concept of publication, which was a

weekly magazine. And umm, Gramp was the… sales and advertising director. And it was Time

Life. It was Time Magazine, actually before Life even existed.

So he is on the, the uh the front page of the first edition of Time Magazine as the head of

sales or advertising, I‟m not sure which. And… umm… he, they were so successful, he was,

because they got paid in stock. And it became such a successful business that he was able to

retire at age 40 I believe. And then, umm went on to be president of Temple University and

umm, work for the Republican government, and was an advisor to the treasurer and something,

the financial advisor during WWII, (I, I don‟t know). He did a lot of sort of political appointed

kinds of positions and umm.

But one of the things that, one of the stories I think the one maybe Cal told, was that uh.

He was called Bob Johnson. And Bob Johnson… I think that‟s right… was just a nice,

friendly, guy. And he liked everybody. And was interested in everybody. And so... uh, one of

the stories is that the paper boy at Time Magazine… who (you know) ran errands for

everybody, he came and was doing something for Gramp and Gramp said, “So Joe. How‟s, how

are things going?” And Jo said “Oh Fine.” And he said “No no, no, I mean, how are- come sit

down. How are things going?” So he talked to Joe like he was just anybody and could have

been the other, you know the president of something else or uh, or the main writer or whatever,

because Gramp was really really interested in people.

So Jo felt like he was important and that‟s how Gramp treated everybody. He just treated

everyone equally and uh with respect and was interested in them. So that‟s the story I know of

Gramp. [ 49.11]

Santificationflippityflop

[ 6:56] So… then there is the santificationflippityflop story, which is a story, that Grandy

certainty told us the first time. Although it‟s a little hard for me to remember whether Grandy or

mom told stories. But umm… I think it must have been one of Grandy‟s… brothers, although it

might have been a generation back from Grandy… where… one of the boys, and I, I picture him

as being pretty young, maybe 14 or something was invited to a very fancy party. And this party

was (you know) the kind where you have lots of silver-, my impression would be that it had lots

of silverware and you have to pay attention to your manners, and everyone‟s dressed up, and

everything.

So uh… his mother told him that once he‟d had enough to eat, and the other thing was

that there were people serving the food to the guests at the table, so would come with the platter,

umm, on the left side and offer food. And, so what him mother said [dad breathing out in

background] was “When you‟ve had enough to eat…what you need to say is, „I‟ve had a

sufficiency, thank you.‟”

So he was trying to be really really polite and when he‟d had enough to eat and the

person coming by, the server, came, came by to offer him more food, he was doing his very best

and he said “I’ve had a santificationflippityflop, thank you.” So that has gone down through

the generations and, everyone knows when yo- you‟re too full you say, “No thanks, I‟ve had a

santificationflippityflop.” [8:50]

Grammom and Cal

[30:15] So and then the other [sigh] uh, story for mom is that after dad died, mom was 49, he

was 51. And uh…so they had pretty good marriage and five children and all that good stuff

and… I believe that mom never… had any idea that she would ever, ever, have another date,

have another romance, certainly not have another marriage, ever again. She‟d had her marriage

and that was it, and I don‟t think it ever occurred to her, [laughing while saying the next bit] it

certainly never occurred to me, so, umm…

But… As things would have it, she was… on her way to Virgin Gorda... ah… one of the

earlier years that she was there. And umm, early 90s. And she was on his tiny little plane and

someone passed a note to her, passed along to her, saying umm, “Sarah Lawrence, class of so

and so? 43? And Sally, class of 43, Sarah Lawrence?” and so she looked over and saw that this,

umm, person who was another Sarah Lawrence graduate, ah… a year before her, named Jane

somethingorother. And so Jane and her husband Cal Whipple, where flying to Virgin Gorda and

they chatted a little bit and they actually visited each other once or twice, hosted each other kind

of for cocktails once or twice while they were in Virgin Gorda.

And umm… that was lovely, and then… sometime within the year… umm, Mom read

that Jane had died, and read the obituary, and wrote a lovely note to Cal, as mom would do.

And… on the basis of that, is my understanding, Cal… uh, invited mom out for dinner. And… I

would say certainly within 6 months of Jane‟s dying. And umm, and they, they started courting.

And … despite mom‟s [laughing while saying the next bit] attempts to say she wasn‟t being

courted, but.

Umm… and… so after awhile, Cal decided that he really wanted to marry Mom and

asked her and she … said no… And then.. umm, so they, they continued to, to see each other,

and things continued to develop and then… that winter they both went down to Virgin Gorda.

And, and they stayed at the same place, but of course they stayed in different cabins. And Sally,

my sister Sally, and Geoff, her husband, and maybe their boys, probably, also went down that

year, I did not… And, from Sally and Geoff‟s report they were such little absolutely doting love

birds [laughing] that it was very clear to them exactly what was going on. But mom continued

to say she wouldn‟t marry Cal because she did not want to… umm, have the beauty of the

paradise kind of a place as Virgin Gorda influence her into saying yes to him , when she, she had

to say yes to him in cold Connecticut if she was [laughing] going to say yes to him because that

was more real. So she couldn‟t say yes to him in Virgin Gorda, but shortly after they returned to

cold Connecticut she did say yes. And they married and they were married for…uhh, quite a

few years [laughing] 15 years, I would guess, 16 years, I think they were married.

Anyways, so… I guess the good luck for mom was saying no first and then saying yes.

[34:47]