A few years ago I was very interested
in finding out more about my family history. My middle name is Ernest and my mom had told me the middle name came from Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent. I was curious to find out if we were related somehow.
I also lived in Delware for awhile when I was going to grad school for acting at The Professional Theatre Training Program (PTTP) at the University of Delaware. Howard Pyle was a famous illustrator of children's books who had lived in Delaware. I was curious to find out if we were related as well.
Growing up, everyone had always laughed at the last name Pyle and then called me Gomer, after Gomer Pyle, USMC, the television show that was a spin off of The Andy Griffin Show. I was never curious to find out if we were related, because the character of Gomer was a bumbling idiot who always did the right thing and I already felt like that most of the time growing up and didn't like when people called me that. (I still watched the show, however, and secretly liked the fact that my last name, at least, was on t.v.) In fact, one time on the bus I even punched an older, bigger kid in the head once when he wouldn't stop calling me Gomer after I asked him to many, many times. He stopped. But others still thought it was hilarious to call me Gomer and say, "Well, go-o-o-llee" to me. This was Pyle's catch phrase on the show.
So, anyway, I had always assumed that we were somehow related to the English Pyle family that could trace their family tree to Howard Pyle, the famous illustrator from Delaware. I had always assumed that because I really wanted it to be true. We had spent a lot of time living fairly close to Delaware after all and I loved art and drawing and painting, and so, we MUST somehow be related.
Then the internet got invented. (More on that in future posts.) I started doing research online and trying to dig up information about my family's history. As I do this, I find out that our original last name is not Pyle at all, but Pfeil (Arrow) in German and that we come from a line of Mennonite families who came to the U.S. to pursue religious freedom.
In a funny twist, growing up, my first real girlfriend (kisses, gifts, heartbreak) was a Mennonite girl from the same area that my original ancestor, Hienrich Pfeil, lived. Not only that, but I found out that most of my relatives were buried in a disused Mennonite Church graveyard that had been turned into a Historical Society.
I packed up the car one winter and headed to my Dad's. He lives not too far from the cemetery and I made my way out there. I passed that old elementary school where I had first fallen in love with and fought other boys over my Mennonite girlfriend with long blonde hair, glasses and a traditional hairnet, where my second grade teacher, who was also Mennonite, let me drive a horse and buggy one day in the rain when she and her beau were "sparking", where I played kickball on muggy spring afternoons not 300 yards from the bones of my ancestors, who I had no idea were buried there.
As I climbed the rocky hill just covered over with frost and searched those crumbling headstones for clues to my past, I made a few discoveries that led me to write about it in this post.
The first thing I discovered is that my family members had changed the way their name was spelled almost immediately upon arriving here. They CREATED a new identity for themselves as Americans by changing the old German spelling from Pfeil to Piel then to Pile and eventually settled on Pyle. On each generation's gravestones the name was spelled slightly differently even between husbands and wives and siblings. They were literally making a name for themselves in this new place. They were creating a new identity that seemed to fit what they were trying to accomplish.
The other discovery, and the one that directly relates to me being one of the lucky ones, happened as I moved from graves from the 1700's closer to the present day.
I found the parents of my great grandfater, Arthur Wilson Pyle, buried there. Around them were three tiny gravestones marking the death of a beloved child, each only a few years old, dated around the time of the great flu epidemics of the early part of the last century. My great grandfather was the only child to survive. He is not buried in this cemetery because he survived. He's buried in another cemetery where the Pyle's now lay peacefully on a hill. A hill where my mother is also laid to rest.
Just like the quote above, if Arthur Wilson had succumbed to the flu like his siblings, I wouldn't be here today in this form writing this blog post at 1 a.m. and feeling damn lucky to be doing so.
I AM one of the lucky ones. He was, too. He passed on his genes and drive and creating-a-name-for-himself-iveness that I carry with me and have hopefully passed on in some way to my three sons.
YOU are lucky, too, if you are reading this because your ancestors have passed on similar qualities to you that have allowed you to be here, even for this brief span of time. Feeling lucky like this is important, I think, because it gives another reason to express that luck in some way creatively.
Be lucky, YOU, LLC'ers. Follow the practices. Get out there and create instead of consuming all the time. Think of it as a way honoring those who have come before you and who were just as lucky themselves. Share your luck with the world.
