In many ways, writing was the easy part. I used my cousins' groundwork as the basis of the early sections on how my family lost their prosperous farm on Neville Island in Pittsburgh to eminent domain at the time of World War I. In addition to Marian's booklet, cousin Ned sent me page after page of anecdotes that Grandpa Cole told him as a child. I had heard different versions of some from my mother and liked to include both, allowing readers to form their own opinions.
Ned also sent me more information than I had known about my grandmother's father, Harvey Henderson. My sister and I had grown up thinking he was a ne'er-do-well who had left our great-grandmother to fend for herself most of the time while he was off somewhere galavanting around the world. It turned out that he had gone west to the Dakotas in search of a new life after suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from his Civil War experiences. He settled there and returned to Pennsylvania frequently to plead with his wife to join him. She refused. Ned had learned this from a relative, now deceased, of Harvey's, and there was documentation to back it up.
I wove all this new information into my narrative, rounding out the framework of my family.
The newspaper and periodical articles that Marian had found provided important information not only about the family in the early 1900's but about the eminent situation. I found interviews with other neighbors that were also part of our family tree -- I had not previously known that we were related to the Hamiltons -- the oldest family on the island. They also told of serious harassment from government agents trying to drive them out. In these articles I also found a general report on the eminent domain story of the island. From the fact that all the members of the planning committee were executives of companies that were subsidiaries of U.S. Steel, and the fact that the chairman of the committee was a vice president of Carnegie Steel, I concluded that Carnegie Steel's eventual acquistion of the farms was no coincidence or default occurrence.
From the interviews that Marian did with my two uncles, I was able to get a good picture of what the family went through and what their role was in trying to resist the takeover. I hadn't realized that my family members were the last hold-outs. I also learned that not everyone in the family was unhappy to leave the island.
Coupled with what I already knew, this brought me through chapter five.
Jean, Somewhere in maine
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