Wilson Family Genealogy
Stories about Fern Eleanor (Cook) Lynn
"My brother [Charles William Lynn Jr] and I loved to make tunnels and forts in the straw in the barn. This was back in the days when hay and straw were bundled in rectangular bales. Charles would cut the binding twine and hand the straw out to me. He would work his way back into the straw where, ultimately, we would build a fort. However, we had been told we shouldn't be doing this, because the straw might collapse and bury us. Of course, that only made it all the more fun. But because we didn't want Mom to find out what we'd been doing, before we went back to the house, my brother would sit me down and pick every piece of straw out of my hair."
"My mother told my brother [Charles William Lynn Jr] and me that she would never promise us anything, if it was not totally within her power to keep the promise, because she never wanted to break a promise to us. She made very few promises because of that - including such apparently 'easy' promises as baking cookies (the electricity might go off, we might be out of eggs), going for a ride (the car might break down), and having something in particular for dinner (again, the electricity might go off or something might happen to spoil that meal). However, we heard a lot of 'if nothing happens' and 'I'll try my best.' The one promise she made to us that she always kept was 'I promise to love you.'"
"When I was young, I was very horse-crazy. I wanted a horse very badly. However, it never seemed to happen. One summer, my mother told me that I could go spend some time with the horses at Mrs. Bauer's place on the Nelson Road. (The Nelson Road was originally called the Smoyer Road, after my great-grandparents, Peter and Rachel (Ortt) Smoyer. Mrs. Bauer owned the first farm on the Smoyer/Nelson Road from Beebe Road. That had been Peter Smoyer's place. My mother never got over the fact that the town changed the name of the road without asking anyone about it. She always called it the Smoyer Road. One time, a man stopped at the house and asked if we knew where the Smoyer Road was. Mom told him that he had stopped at probably the only house on Beebe Road where someone could anwer that question. He also got a bit of a history lesson!) I went over many times and ended up mucking out stalls and grooming the horses. It was years later before Mom said something that made me ask what I was supposed to be doing with the horses. Mom said that Mrs. Bauer was going to teach me to ride, but she said I seemed to be content to just be around the horses. I was very surprised, because no one had mentioned the riding part."
"Our farm is very rocky, with lots of holes. My mother told me that her younger brother, Wilfred [Dennis "Wilfred" Cook], had been given a thoroughbred racehorse who was too slow for the track. The first time he rode it, it stepped in a hole and broke its leg, and had to be put down. She said that she would rather that I hated her for not getting me a horse, than to have me go through something like that. Somehow, that just made me love her more."
"Mom thoroughly believed in the old saying 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all,' but she found herself tried when she was working during World War II. The women had their own break room, and most ate their lunch there. Mom did as well, but she apparently learned to eat very quickly, because she didn't like most of the 'conversations' the other women had. One day was particularly vexing, with many of the women talking about other women who were not present. Mom told me she had just had enough, and when she was walking out the door after finishing her lunch, she turned around and told the people in the room, 'Okay, I'm leaving now. You can start talking about me!'"
"When I got out of college and got my first job, my mother told me that, as long as I was able to pay for them, I should get the things I really wanted (as well as needed), and visit the places I really wanted to see, because I didn't want to be 80, sitting around saying 'I wish I had . . .' With her encouragement, I got the thing I really wanted (at that time, a cedar chest) and visited the places I really wanted to see (including underwater as a scuba diver). I took pictures of all my trips, and my mother got to see a lot of places through those pictures. And, as it turned out, it was also a lot easier to see those places when I was younger, than it would have been after 9/11/2001."
"Mom loved lemons - she ate them like oranges. The first year we went to Arizona for the winter, she was very pleasantly surprised to find a lemon tree, loaded with fruit, right outside her bedroom window. That first year, we got over 400 lemons from that one tree. One day Mom was watching me zest some of the lemons, with a wistful look in her eyes. When I asked her what she was thinking about, she said that she wished she had her grandmother's [Mary Catherine (Smoyer) Wilson] recipe for lemonade, because it was the best she had ever had. I asked her if she thought the recipe would be in Mary's cookbook. She said maybe, but what good was that? I hadn't told her, but I had brought Mary's cookbook with us. I looked through it, and found her lemonade recipe - the juice of one lemon, two cups of water, and two cups of sugar! No wonder my mother loved it - it was everything her sweet tooth could have possibly asked for! I made her lemonade using that recipe at first, then I started making it so that it was just on the far side of how sweet I could drink it - she was in seventh heaven. She had all the lemonade she could possibly drink that year, and the next, when we got over 800 lemons off the same tree."
"Mom was emphatic about her career. She told us that she was a homemaker, not a housewife! She said that she was making a home for her family, she wasn't married to her house."
"When Mom graduated from high school in 1933, she decided she needed to get a job. Her first job was working for the photographer at Olcott [Niagara, NY, USA]."
"For their honeymoon, Mom and Dad drove to Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains of NY. I don't know if she was really aware of it before that, but on the trip Mom learned that she got very, very, car-sick. She was nauseated much of the trip. Dad, who never got sick to his stomach, found it a bit amusing, and joked about it when they got home. Mom's grandmother, Mary Catherine (Smoyer) Wilson said something to the effect of 'It's no laughing matter, is it?' Mom said that that was the first time she knew that her grandmother also had motion sickness. Considering all of the car trips she and Ben [Benjamin Ernest Wilson] made, Mom said that gave her a whole new respect for her grandmother."
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These are stories that Fern told about her early life.
"I attended District 4 School on Beebe Road. This is the same one-room schoolhouse where my grandparents [Benjamin Ernest Wilson and Mary Catherine Smoyer], and my mother and uncles [Florence May Wilson, Armour Peter Wilson, and Dwight Dewey Wilson] went to school. I was usually the one who went next door to get water for the school from Mrs. Schnoor, because there was no water at the schoolhouse. My sister and brothers and I usually walked to school with the Bartz children. We would take off our shoes and walk barefoot along the dirt road. Somehow our parents found out that we weren't wearing our shoes. Mother [Florence May (Wilson) Cook] told us that we were to wear our shoes. So we did, at least we had them on when we left home and when got back. We took them off when we couldn't be seen from the house, and would stop at a neighbor's on the way home and wash our feet in the cattle trough. Everything was going fine until the neighbor stopped in one day and asked Mother to tell us not to wash our feet in his cattle trough anymore because the cattle wouldn't drink the water!"
"At District 4, after I had finished my work, I had nothing to do, so I listened while the teacher taught the higher grades. Because of this, I knew the work, and was advanced a grade. There were two years in age between all of us kids, but I graduated from high school the year after Russ [Benjamin "Russell" Cook]."
"When I was young, I was always with my Grandfather [Benjamin Ernest Wilson]. I went everywhere with him. I learned very young not to repeat anything I heard said by the grownups. I used to go with Granddad when he got the Sunday newspaper at Karsten's store [Henry "Arnold" Karsten, father of Paul Arnold Karsten]. He would leave the car running while he ran in, and I would back it up and turn it around so that it facing home. That's how I learned to drive a car."