52 Ancestors Week 45: A Family Value

 From Amy Johnson Crow: The theme for Week 45 is “A Family Value.” Love, family, honesty, charity – these are just a few words that describe family values. Who is someone that seems to embody what’s important to your family? Of course, feel free to interpret this prompt however you wish. 

Where do I begin this week’s blog? Love and honesty have always been a huge deal with my family. That goes without saying. Was it ever like a sitcom? No. But we always had to be honest. There is, however, an unspoken value that seems to resonate in my family tree and it’s been there for as long as I can remember. Everyone in my family valued the importance of a good education. Everyone.

This explains why both of my parents excelled in their respective fields. Remember. My father was a dentist and my mother was a lab supervisor. They didn’t get into Suffolk University on looks alone! Their parents instilled in them the importance of a good education and that was passed down to my brother and I.

 My maternal grandparents Bob Hamel and Natalie Felker always believed that education was important. They went to every high school graduation for most of the grandkids. I’m still somewhat shocked that they actually stood in the pouring rain when I graduated high school. They wrote all of us grandkids great cards and were always very generous.

They believed so strongly that education was important because of the era they lived in when they were younger. You will not find a picture of their parents in any high school yearbook. You will, however, find my grandparents’ photos in Newburyport and Haverhill. 

You could argue that it was because of how things were back in those days. People didn’t have a lot of the chances my parents and grandparents had growing up. Granted, they didn’t continue their education but it didn’t matter. My grandfather saw the world as a member of the Air Force. He learned through experience and in reality that is probably the greatest teacher of all. Why sit in a classroom learning about Japan when you’ve seen it first hand?

At the end of the day my mother was the only one of her siblings to receive a higher education and it never bothered my grandparents in the slightest. They just wanted everyone to be happy. My grandfather never yelled or anything. He would say he was disappointed, though. But it was never out of malice. They both cheered when we all did our best and that’s really all they wanted.

On the Italian side of the tree, things got a little interesting. They valued education as much as my maternal side for sure. However, things went a little overboard when you consider how many of my father’s cousins are doctors and were highly educated.

Seriously . One of my dad’s cousins was an optician. Her worked on people’s eyes and yet he never gave mine a second look.  ;)

Th y valued education like the French-Canadians in the tree because of family history. Before my father’s generation entered the medical field, their parents and grandparents were laborers. If you look at the professions on the Italian birth records, you will see generations of people working as laborers or seamstresses.

While those fields are important, my great-grandparents wanted a better life for their children and grandchildren. That was one of the reasons why people moved out of Italy and settled in America. The same can even be said for the Canadians in the tree because in Quebec a lot of people were farmers. Everyone in the tree valued education because it was the best way to have a better life than the previous generation. In a nutshell, that is why education is so important in my family!

See ya next time!