Back from the chaos of vacation

We're back with more family news. I've been on vacation for almost all of August, driving to Minnesota and back, renovating a room or two at home, and getting Helen back to college. Along the way, I was able to visit with many family: Ed and Ann Lufkin took all four of us out to lunch when we stopped by Northfield to see Carleton and St. Olaf (for Peter -- he's a senior this year). Apparently Ed knew he wanted to do medicine at an early age, for he says his major at Carleton was a basic pre-med program. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college, and Peter is not too clear on his future, either. I've always been in awe of such focused folks. It took me years to puzzle out my calling. I remember at one point, when I was almost 30 and still not settled in a career, I shared my embarrassment with Aunt Anne (High). She told me Lufkins were all late bloomers, so welcome to the club. She may have been exaggerating, but she cheered me up.

After about 4 days visiting with Bill's family (his parents live in Woodbury, and his two sisters are in Corcoran and Hugo), we stayed with my sister Anne and her husband John Haley and their menagerie on East River Road, where we are always comfortable and happy. We enjoyed their new veranda out front, with a great view of the whole population of Mpls driving, biking, running or walking by at all hours of the day and night. Their cooking is worth a detour all by itself.

During that time, we were able to spend a day with Mimi and Tom Scanlan in St. Anthony Park, where there was general devastation due to a storm about a week earlier. A straight line storm tore through and took a lot of trees out. Tom and Mimi had recently thinned their trees, and none of the remaining ones went down, luckily. But the neighborhood was hard hit. Mimi is still an avid walker, and they both bird and like to travel.

More tomorrow. Ed has sent me a drawing of the Lufkin family chapel in the old country, which I will scan in and post. That's all for now. Please let me know any family news you want in this space.

This is a significant advance in the history of Lufkin archives, the blog site set up by Kate. My hope is that many others will visit the site and contribute to it, and I'll suggest Art Smith and Murray Lufkin be some of the early ones. It will take me a while to learn how to post photos and other material, but I'll get on it at once. Ed

Jim Lufkin's funeral

Dad died on March 12, and his funeral was on March 24th, his 88th birthday. It was wonderful, all the people who showed up. Here are a few photos:
This is Tony Lufkin, on the left, with his father Tom, and cousin Ed Lufkin. Tony now lives directly across the street from St. Mary's, our home parish, where the funeral took place.





The five of us kids were together again for the first time in many years. Left to right, Susan, David, Anne, Eric and me. We were at Anne's house after the service. She and her husband, John, knocked themselves out being hospitable, as usual.

Ginny Lufkin (married to Tom) and Ann Lufkin (married to Ed) were at the funeral. Without a family reunion on a regular basis, we just don't get to see some of these dear folks very often. I was married at this church in 1979, and I remember Aunt Bing craning her neck up at Bill (who is 6'4") in the receiving line. She told Bill that her mother (Edith Hall Lufkin) had been 4"10", and let him know that she was glad to get some tall genes into the family.

That's all for now. Next time, some more vintage photos.

First Post

Some of you are old enough to remember when I was sending out a newsletter of the Archive, publishing photos and letters of yore. Running a parish and raising children have intervened, and you haven't heard that much from me, except sometimes at Christmas -- if your name is in the first half or third of the alphabet, which is about all I've gotten through in recent years.

But time has passed. My kids are older and going off to college. My father, Jim Lufkin, died in March. With his passing, I've returned to his letters, which I first came across in Mary Castleman Lufkin's attic after her death (that would have been in 1971). Dad could write a good letter, and at age 16, I was mesmerized by his accounts of going off to flight school and then the war in the Pacific.

And now my husband, Bill Day, and I have torn our bedroom apart for the first time in 10 years, and of course there is all my archive material: not a ton, exactly, but a lot of letters and photos, some of which I haven't even been able to really read, yet. So it feels like time to get back to the Archive, and this blog is the start. I hope you will let your immediate family members know about it, and encourage them to comment, leave addresses, etc.

Here I am with Dad and sister Anne Haley last February. He was just as charming as ever, though losing ground steadily.






I want to begin with our great-grandmother Edith. She was the one who started doing the genealogy for her children, so that they could qualify for the Mayflower Society, or something. She was a graduate of Wellesley College, class of 1888. Since Wellesley was founded in 1875, she was in one of the earlier classes. This photo is one I found in the archives at Wellesley. Perhaps it is a graduation photo. I was at Wellesley because my daughter, Helen, was looking at the college. In fact, she now attends Wellesley, and will herself be graduating in the class of 2009 (majoring in developmental psychology, minoring in music). The photo below shows her with her proud parents on her first day at Wellesley

Edith was the second of two children. Her older brother died when he was ten years old. No doubt, if he had lived, Edith's parents would have sent him to college. In that case, perhaps they would not have sent her. In any case, Edith's incredible good fortune was to have a first rate education -- something available to very few women of her day. I remember that when I talk to my friends and find that often they are the first women in their families to attend college, and in some cases they were actively discouraged by their parents. Happily, things are changing.

Edith was the first in her class to marry. She and her husband, Harry Lufkin, settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Harry put out his shingle and built a thriving medical practice. Unlike some (there was at least one doctor in her class at Wellesely), Edith did not go into a profession. Instead, she put her education to good use raising six very bright and talented children: Hamilton (my grandfather, a civil engineer), Bernardine ("Bing," a Smith graduate and editor of a medical journal), Nathaniel (a pathologist), Dexter (internal medicine), Edie Harriett (died at age 5), and Anne (anesthesiologist). The five surviving children have formed the nucleus of the extended family that I grew up with. All the great aunts and uncles, cousins and so forth that I remember from many family reunions are descendants of Edith and Harry.

When Anne Lufkin High was in her later years, she was kind enough to pass on to me a metal box of letters that had been her mother's. I've got them, along with numerous photos and letters of my dad's, carefully stored here at home. In the following months, I will share them with you in this space.

I've invited a couple of cousins of ours to enter posts as well, so I hope we will be hearing from them.

Let the fun begin!