Day 136, Year 7: A Little Family History
Date: Friday, March 23, 2012
Weather: Overcast with Rain Early, Beautiful Afternoon, Unseasonably Warm
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, MA
Oliver Preston Goldstone arrived home from the hospital at noon today. Jed
sent out an email to family and friends earlier in the morning announcing
Oliver’s birth and that is when I found out his middle name. We knew it was
going to be either Maxwell or Preston and the family connections to the name
Preston won out. On Thanksgiving Day we were at Sue and John Reed’s home in
Cambridge. Sue is Jed’s mother’s sister and while some were napping
mid-afternoon, I asked Sue to give me a quick overview of their family
history. At one point she was talking about her Uncle Pres. I immediately
chimed in that I also had a Great Uncle Pres and neither of us has ever
known anyone else by that name. At that point in time, Heather and Jed were
struggling to come up with a name for another boy, so Sue and I thought
Preston might be just the name since it was a name in both Heather’s and
Jed’s families. I related that conversation to Heather and Jed and now we
have another Preston. Heather has asked me for information on my Uncle Pres
a couple of times, but somehow we never really got to talk about it. So
I’ll relate the Preston connection here.
William Preston Miller was one of fifteen children born of Wilson Miller and
Rebecca Jane Campbell, both with good Scottish surnames. My grandmother,
Sidney Jane Miller Biggs was one of the fifteen children and was Preston’s
younger sister. I don’t know why he was called Pres instead of by his first
name, but when I was little girl, we would go visit Uncle Pres and another
of the brothers, Uncle Lundy. The parents, Wilson and Becky Jane, lived in
Wikel, West Virginia. Wilson was born in 1844 and died in 1898 from wounds
he sustained in the Spanish American War of 1898 (fought in Cuba and the
Philippines). That left Becky Jane in Wikel. She lived to a ripe old age
and the little valley where she lived is now called Becky Jane Holler. In
other parts of the world a holler would be a hollow, but not in Appalachian
English. When Heather was four, Mark and I moved to Wikel and lived there
for five years. I used to take Heather and Justin out on the ridge above
Becky Jane Holler to pick blackberries, so hopefully someday Oliver will get
to visit Wikel and pick blackberries, too.
Mark worked at West Marine today but had to take a little time off to go to
a lab to have some testing done. He is either having some side effects from
the chemo or he is having bladder problems again. Thankfully, he has a
follow-up appointment with his urologist in Boston on Monday. We will have
the results of the today’s lab tests and hopefully Dr. Cutie will be able to
sort out the problem. Mark was not feeling great yesterday, but he is
better today, so probably the issues are just standard side effects. At
least that is the hope.
It has been a busy, eventful week, so we will take it a bit easy this
weekend. I say ‘a bit’ as I know we’ll find too many things that we think
just have to be done. Yesterday Mark bought a new Dremel saw tool that he
hopes will help with the work we are doing on the deck. And I know he is
going to want to try that out. I think I feel the restful weekend slipping
through my fingers.
 |
| 120323 Day 136 Cape Cod, USA–Oliver Comes Home |
