by Peter Twitchell
It is a fact and unfortunate set of circumstances that the older we get we lose our loved ones to old age and our friends that we grew up with to sickness and accidents.
As a consequence we lose connection to our relatives at the younger generation of our families unless we take the time to know our nieces and nephews. Unless we make a concerted effort to get to know our relatives we lose sight of who they are in our family tree.
My cousin Wilben Dahl after retiring made it his life’s work to put together a thorough, exhaustive and careful list of all the relatives within the Twitchell family tree. To say the least he spent a lot of time on it, researching tirelessly all our relatives from here and there – our grandfather was English and Scottish.
It would have been virtually impossible for any of us in the family to finish what Wilben accomplished, we still lose track of loved ones – who they are, where they are, and how we can get in touch with them if they are still here with us.
How was it that I have personally lost track of many relatives who lived in Bethel and I lived there all my life? Today I cannot find those relatives or how to get in touch with them. It is very frustrating because our younger generation grows up, moves on, and gets in the stream of life: getting an education, getting more education, finding a work profession, and taking care of their families.
It seems that this is a general course we all take living from day to day and surviving.
Just recently it’s been a few weeks back, I ran into one of my cousin Henry Kohl’s sons, Max. It was a great brief meeting and we visited for just a few moments and then I wished him well as we went our separate ways to live out the rest of our lives in the stream of living.
It’s been 50 years since my first cousin Susie Woods left Bethel to further her education in the state of California. She came up to Alaska once and told us she married a man and was starting a family. My cousin Joe Woods Jr. told me that he had a niece and a nephew in California. Years later he told me “I don’t even know my sister’s family, they never come to Alaska to meet their Alaskan Family and relatives.”
It is a sad fact but seems to be our fate – not knowing who our relatives are or even talk to them. I hope that this technology now with phones and computers makes access to visit with and talk to relatives a reality.
It was good, the exhaustive and tireless work that my first cousin Wilben Dahl was able to do to locate and document all the Twitchell family tree and still, with my little knowledge of technology today I was never able to get a hold of anyone or to really get to know anyone listed on my family tree.
To this day I am grateful for all my relatives in southwest Alaska who I had an opportunity to visit with and to get to know them as brothers and sisters.
My first cousin Wilben Dahl told me one day after doing all he could spending hours, days , months, and years to exhaustively and carefully list all the Twitchell family tree, that he had discovered that our family had a direct connection to the family of the Lady Godiva. So I asked him, “Wilben, what good does that do me?”
We just laughed together.
