Endeavor

Endeavor: '..to try to do; to set about; to owe; to be under obligation; to try hard; to exert effort; to make an earnest attempt; to strive.' Endeavor begins as a story of five families related by blood, marriage, and a sixth surrogate family by love and friendship. It was the sixth family that raised an important question for the author as to how he defines family. Are they (family) only those who are related by blood, marriage, or are they friendship, legal action, or something broader associated with functions that are similar to what we normally associate with a family? Endeavor is about people, who spent their entire lives striving to achieve something better for their families, themselves, and others without depreciating the value of their work, contribution, or others with whom they shared many things, not the least of which often was unemployment, and poverty. Only one thing could overwhelm them, fear of losing hope and their belief that things would be better. It was their mantra for living. Often beaten down, they were rarely overwhelmed. You will meet the Smiths, immigrants from central Germany early in the nineteenth century. You also will meet the Dungan’s who came to the United States during the great potato famine in Ireland during the mid-1840s. Neither, as they frequently said, 'Had a pot to pee in.' The mix of these two families, three or four generations later, is responsible for the author’s presence in a peculiar form of memoir. A second line of decent explains my wife’s presence. Her family came from very old lines in England, specifically Cornwall, Devon, and Wales. Her father immigrated to the United States at the very beginning of the 20th century, and his future wife two years later. The story begins with the Smiths, peasants living in the Ruhr Valley early in the 19th Century where they labored in the coalmines and on their own small patch of land carved from the dark forest, which was their first step up the ladder of achievement. In those days work was communal, as was most of life’s other requirements. The opening chapter is followed by the story of the Dungans, beginning in the early 1850s. They were dirt poor Irish, who traded a potato famine, starvation, and poverty, for a little land, in a new world, Kentucky. Both stories will take the reader to the Great Depression of the 1930’s that shaped an American culture for two generations. The third chapter will introduces the Williams, Old, and Goss families, a treasure of Cornish cousins who formed tight family units for many generations, and who generously included my wife and myself to their group when I married into the Williams family. The Lows, our adopted family are introduced in the sixth chapter, Families at War. From there on, we leave it to the reader to sort out a remarkable collection of people who became the source of our human fire: '..When we were alone with the wind crying Offered us the warmth of a human fire.' (Partial quote from Many Winters, by Nancy Wood)