THE MIGHTY STRACHANS
In 1985 I was the interim minister of the UU church in Kirkland, WA, https://northlakeuu.org/about-northlake/more-northlake-history/ This resourceful and lively congregation was living in a former mortuary, which sounds grim, but was actually quite wonderful, up on a hill looking across the lake at Seattle. We had a great time which I defined as an “affair” rather than a marriage, since the rules of the UUA meant I could only stay one year. This was the group capable of celebrating frogs rather than the Easter bunny by bringing celebratory artifacts that included real frogs and a small boy’s wax sculpture of a frog that still lives on my bookshelves. We sang “Froggie Went a’Courtin’” and other hymns. It was all about transformation.
But the older women complained that all our classes and events were in the evening. They couldn’t drive at night and were inclined to go to bed early, but they wished for something in the afternoon. The genealogy craze was just beginning, so I bought a big roll of wide paper, the kind used to top picnic tables, and we used it to draw charts while talking through each of our own families, taking turns one per meeting.
We looked at dates, patterns, things like twins and divorces, still births, people who had disappeared, bigger history cycles among nations since we were old enough to remember WWII, and economic roller coasters. Many times we stopped, looked at each other, and gasped.
We were doing the work that Blackfeet women do when they talk among themselves after the children and men have gone to bed, so late that it becomes early and dreams enter the conversation. This is where the sense of a family forms and connects everyone in spite of disaster and even great triumphs which can be equally divisive.
Now, at age 81, I have separated from my scattered family. But I still trace these paths through time. They have become universal and pull my relations out of their guarded security holes, but they don’t know it. I found alcoholics, bad marriages, the prairie affliction of iodine deficiency that deranges thyroid metabolism and persists for generations, a case of paranoid schizophrenia (luckily not a blood relative of mine), three traumatic brain injuries that destroyed normality, but no college grads until we get to my nuclear family. I am the only one left living from that nuclear five.
We had expected big things in the way that British-origin homesteaders and Oregon Trail pioneers always do, thinking of their success-craving as praiseworthy rather than the impetus of empire. My father’s family in particular, brought from Scotland by our cranky and idealistic great-grandfather, Archibald, were so proud as to be looking for a fall. Seeking to be Thomas Jefferson, Archibald brought three teenagers to South Dakota: Jean, Jessie and Sam. Thomas was born in 1892 after they reached DeVoe, S.D. His son, Gene, composed in his late years as complete an account of that line as he could. Ten years ago he insisted on visiting me to review my father’s photo albums which began recording the parallel when my grandfather, Sam, took his own teenagers (Bruce, Glenn, May and Seth) north to Swan River, Manitoba, still seeking prosperity by raising potatoes. (Gene has since died.)
Sam, who had been well-educated in Scotland, and Beulah, who qualified to teach public school, preserved a sense of being somehow just short of landed gentry with a faith in education as the key to success. Therefore, they sent Bruce, my father, to college, first in Manitoba and then to Oregon State College where he earned a master’s degree with a thesis about potato economics. The idea was that his success would pull the rest of the family to Oregon.
Bruce was just short of arrogant and took great pride in being a Strachan, discovering the family name’s coat of arms and actually going to Strachan, a small village near the River Dee where there was once a fortification called Strath au Cairn (River of Rocks). This was all fantasy and had nothing to do with Archibald’s leaving Kilmarnock where the family had lived and he had been a finish carpenter. The Strachan descendants maintain the idea that they are from Strachan rather than Kilmarnock. They do not think of themselves as working class. Those younger than myself have mostly managed to get college degrees but we are scattered across the USA.
When I was in high school, a calypso band came to visit Portland. The band leader’s name was Strachan, so my father hustled down there to claim a new relative. Coming back, he was disconcerted — the band was black! And so was Strachan! A bit of investigation revealed that a branch of the oh-so-aristocratic Strachans of the past had owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean and had also owned slaves, who took the names and sometimes the genes of their owners. After a bit of teasing, this was put aside and never mentioned again.
When I married Bob Scriver, something similar happened. Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver, his mother, had the same pretentious connection to landed gentry in Scotland, the same pride and sense of entitlement — which was a little more realistic in her case since her mother had taken her on a tour of actual distant relatives still in Scotland. She didn’t have the coat of arms on the wall, but she did have a clan book listing all the tartans and the families that owned them.
Wessie’s friends picked up the book and saw that one sentence about Macfies had been blacked out. Wessie wouldn’t talk about it. In Waterton, Alberta, which caters to Scots-connected tourists, they found the same book and saw that the blacked out sentence said, “MacFies were noted sheep thieves.” They never let that joke die. At the time, Browning was sheep-raising country. Wessie had thought more in terms of English royalty.
The stubborn idea of British ancestors was a kind of religion. No one in my extended family drank alcohol except for the alcoholics which were the reason for their temperance. No one smoked until my brothers were in the military. No one cussed, played poker or bridge, danced, or went to church. Family and prosperity dominated everything, with some attention paid among the Strachans to progressive politics and the achievements of engineers: dams, bridges, and the like. No one really got rich. Those younger than myself have rediscovered the pleasant wickednesses of drinking, smoking, dancing, cards and so on. I don’t know of any who go to church except for my mother and myself.
