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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Images Of Past Help Define Who We Are

Beverly Vorpahl Staff writer

There’s nothing quite so exhilarating as the sensation that surges through your body during a life-defining moment. Everything else around you fades into nothingness.

They’re more than ordinary unforgettable moments, like becoming “lost” during my wedding vows. My wandering mind snapped to attention as I vaguely heard the minister repeat something he’d just said. I suddenly realized I was supposed to repeat those words. Or the tremendous joy and relief I felt when told our fourth child was a girl. Since a second daughter could wear it, my extravagant purchase of a $15 red velvet Christmas dress I’d bought for her “big” sister was justified!

No, life-defining moments make your individual world stand still, such as the way my eyes quivered uncontrollably as I saw the first smile light my first baby’s face. Or the euphoria that lifted me during the production of a one-act play I wrote for a playwrights festival.

Although their occurrence is rare, I’ve encountered two other such moments that have made indelible impressions on my mind and in my heart.

The first was when my husband and I were in Ohio, visiting friends.

Knowing of my interest in history, our friend, Jim, drove us miles and miles to a special place for dinner. At last we stopped in front of an imposing, white frame-house with a wrap-around porch that exuded Americana. True to its aura of importance, the house had been a haven for runaway slaves fleeing the South in search of freedom.

Every fiber in my body tingled when Jim told about the house serving as a station in the underground railroad.

I’ll never forget that physical feeling.

I anticipated the same sensation when the plane landed in England on our long-anticipated trip there. But it didn’t happen. I was so disappointed the moment was defined only by the absence of the curious tingle. Evidently, you can’t plan these experiences. They’re serendipitous.

But it happened again. In Nebraska.

A friend and I drove to Atkinson, Neb., where my dad was born in 1890. I was gathering information to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday. We threw him a big party, even though he died when he was 82.

At the Holt County Courthouse, we found records of my grandfather’s homestead and determined its location on an area map.

When we drove up the driveway, the land’s current owner was mystified by our car’s Washington state license plates. Why would anyone drive halfway across the country to knock on her door?

After we explained our mission, she said nothing was left of the homestead, except for a lane lined on either side with cottonwood trees. We were welcome to go down there, the woman said, even though there was nothing to see.

That rutted road my grandfather had made led to where the two-storied frame house, my dad’s birth site, once stood. I hope to always remember that drive beneath the canopy of leaves growing from the very trees my grandfather had planted a century earlier.

It was a spiritual moment.

Genealogy unifies these two life-defining experiences. (I can almost always find a way to link genealogy to most anything.)

Because of my zeal for history in general and my appreciation of ancestral history, I want to know all there is to know about those whose history I share though blood lines.

I’ve begun a new phase of life with semi-retirement (talk about life-defining moments) with time now to write accounts of my ancestors and the times in which they lived. The first, about my ninth-great-grandmother who helped settle this country in 1632, is all but published.

Now it’s time to research another: I’ve recently learned about Duncan McDowell, a slave granted his freedom in the will of John McDowell, my great-great-grandfather. It seems Duncan teamed with kin of John McDowell to operate an underground railroad in Indiana. Shades of Ohio!

I want to research the McDowell efforts and tell of their accomplishments. And, if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll encounter another life-defining moment.

, DataTimes MEMO: Beverly Vorpahl is a part-time copy editor and writer for The Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5487.

Beverly Vorpahl is a part-time copy editor and writer for The Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5487.