My family has never been really big on lineage or ancestry. On one hand, my midwestern Grandma could have presented our family history within the confines of a shoebox, the contents inside consisting of a stack of extremely old photographs that are fairly unlabelled and mostly are those crazy Victorian era, 19th century group portraits where everyone looks like they’re having the worst time of their lives. There’s also the awkward run-ins with people that are 3rd or 4th cousins in St. Louis, where the Catholics have landed and plan on never leaving. It’s interesting, for sure, but doesn’t really provide any better insight into our family heritage. We’re Irish. All we need to know.
On the other side, things have been a bit more orderly. Again, we either know or are related to a large percentage of this piece of rural New Jersey, and connecting Pennsylvania; however, this time things are better documented. My Grandmother has kept an overwhelming collection of information, consisting of photographs and stories, about the traces of bot her and her husband’s roots and there isn’t a moment when she wouldn’t be willing to tell you everything there is to know about the Weisses, Andrews, Monninghoffs, and any other close group of relatives. However, seeing as I grew up a mere 600 miles down the road, my sister and I have never really gotten a complete account of the story.
This weekend, however, on this same side of the family, I received a fairly invaluable family heirloom which was both a surprise and has given me a piece of my family’s past which I had never really felt connected to before. The gift is a 130+ year old mandolin that was the possession of my great grandmother in the mid 1890s during her childhood years. The mandolin was no toy however. After my grandmother conducted some careful researching, which is fairly impressive for a 90 year old lady who has no idea what the internet is and is scared to death of cell phones, she was able to trace together the story of the instrument all the way back to its original construction in Italy; it had come over with the my great grandmother’s mandolin instructor’s family, who’s name escapes me currently. Anyway, watching my grandmother and grandfather read me this account they had been writing down since November (“How It All Began” by Mama Weiss, as the first line reads) about the process of unearthing all of this history behind it and seeing just how excited they were really put into perspective just how major of an emotional experience this was for them, and just how priceless this gift really is. For even though they got it restrung (for a lefty, which I’m unbelievably impressed they remembered) with new strings and gave me a box of picks, I’m more touched that they would give me such a major family heirloom, more than just the instrument itself (which sounds rich and beautiful, by the way).
It’s the old style of mandolin, with the big, hollow cavity that’s shaped in a large oval, as opposed to the flatter, guitar style modern mandolin. The wood is exquisite and in pristine condition for being so inconceivably old. There is also some inlay work who’s composition I haven’t really been able to discern yet.
But seriously, how unreal.
