The Dexter Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Inspiration in history
Librarian Lawler discovers many connections with grandmother
By Sheila Pursglove, Special Writer
PUBLISHED: March 20, 2008
Sally Haines Lawler has been fascinated by family history since childhood, inspired by stories told by her grandmother, Mabel Pye.
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And in researching that history, Lawler discovered how her life and her grandmother's life intersected in unexpected ways.
Lawler, a public services librarian at the University of Michigan Social Work Library in Ann Arbor, has fond memories of Pye, who was born in 1879 and taught her to cross-stitch and to sew a hem.
"She was a beautiful seamstress who taught her daughters and granddaughters to sew their own clothes," Lawler said. "For Easter when I was 5 years old, our mother made my sister and me matching coats, with covered buttons and tailored collars to wear over smocked pinafores grandma had stitched by hand.
"Mother photographed me in my red wool coat and Laurie in her blue one in the daffodil field across the street from our house."
That summer, Pye traveled from California to Seattle to see her grandchildren, bringing blue Mandarin-style jackets she trimmed with red-braid fasteners.
Lawler and her sister wore the Chinese jackets and matching pants on a trip with their grandmother to Mount Rainier, where their mother photographed them standing on piles of snow in front of Paradise Lodge.
In later years, Lawler's grandmother would let her into the sewing room - with its stashes of lace, buttons, ribbons, threads and fabric from 50 years of dressmaking. Lawler would daydream about dresses she would one day sew.
"Grandma was a stern teacher, and I probably learned from her to appreciate the hardest teachers in school. But best of all, I loved storytelling and history because of her."
That love came from stories her grandmother would tell after dinner.
Lawler's parents stayed in the dining room, drinking port and rolling their eyes, saying, "There goes mother, living in the past again."
In the 1950s reminiscence was not yet accepted as a natural form of aging, Lawler said.
"Even as a young girl, I thought my parents were rude and a little cruel not to love her stories."
Lawler, her sister and their three cousins would sit entranced, listening to stories:
Of how their grandmother met their grandfather when they both worked in an office in Chicago; how they got engaged via telegram from San Francisco; and how grandmother put together supplies in a trunk and called it her "trousseau."
Of how grandfather traveled by train to get married and then returned to California by train that same day with his new bride.
Of how the young couple set up an office in Sacramento just after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed his office and the hotel where he had been living.
"Grandfather was an Eastman Kodak man and head manager for all business from the Mississippi to the Orient from 1906 to 1949," Lawler said.
Beneath the story of their happy marriage was an undercurrent of tragedy, Lawler said.
Remembering stories from childhood about the divorce of her grandmother's parents, a crystal shop in Chicago, and the stock market crash that ruined the family, Lawler decided to dig back into the past.
Some years ago, she attended a domestic violence conference in Chicago sponsored by the YWCA, an organization that was influential in her college years.
"I thought it interesting that the University of Washington YWCA where I had been active at the local, national, and international level, had morphed into a women's crisis center at the same time I was doing crisis intervention at the Assault Crisis Center in Ann Arbor," she said.
Lawler took two additional days to explore La Salle Street where her grandmother once lived in a German boarding house with her brother, and various libraries, including the Newberry Library, where she searched the 1900 Census.
This placed her great-grandmother in the Kankakee Asylum, not in the Cook County poorhouse, as her grandmother had told her.
A clerk at the county courthouse helped locate and order the divorce papers of Lawler's great-grandparents, and she received them by mail a few weeks later.
From typed court testimony from 1894, Lawler learned that her great-grandfather had been a traveling salesman who abused and deserted his wife, and that instead of owning a crystal shop, her mother took in laundry and sewing.
It may not have been the lost fortune that ruined Lawler's great-grandmother and sent her to the poorhouse, but domestic violence and mental illness instead.
"I felt that the unspoken story of family violence was a powerful force in my life at the root of my career as a counselor of - and advocate for - victims of domestic violence," Lawler said.
"Uncovering the family secret liberated me and helped me re-evaluate who I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
"I admired my grandmother for protecting her children and grandchildren when family violence and mental illness were taboo, but believed there was a heavy cost for her to have fabricated her childhood," she continued.
"When budget cuts eliminated my job, it was easy to begin a journey to help others focus on both the spoken and unspoken stories of their lives."
It took several years for Lawler to become a librarian and to integrate life review and reminiscence into her library career.
She now works as a Social Work Librarian at the University of Michigan with a Specialization in Aging certificate, and leads writing groups for older adults at the Ann Arbor District Library, called "Reconstructing Life Stories."
It attracts many potential writers, survivors of serious illness and others in transition, she said. The groups bond quickly and the last five groups she facilitated continued meeting on a monthly basis after the eight-week course ended.
Lawler also is networking with public librarians throughout Michigan to incorporate life review and reminiscence writing groups into their outreach programs.
Last year, she attended the International Reminiscence and Life Review Conference in San Francisco.
"I do find that most people in my writing groups have a family secret that they need to talk about," she said.
Sheila Pursglove is a freelance writer. She can be reached at bingley51@yahoo.com.
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