Knowing your roots, strengthens family, town ties

Interesting new research suggests that nothing bonds a family more powerfully than shared family history. When kids say to their parents, “Tell me a story about when you were little like me,” they are instinctively seeking stability.

While exploring family myth and ritual, Emory University psychologist Marshall Duke discovered that the more children know about their family history, ”the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believe their families function.”

Kids who know a lot of stories about their families’ fortunes — and misfortunes — face life’s inevitable changes more competently.

I realized when I read Duke’s formulations that I think the same analysis works for towns. I was immediately reminded of Old Settler Reunions in this area when the earliest residents came to visit, share dinner, and tell the stories of their first days in what would become the Northwest suburbs.

The Kennicott family came from Maine: father, mother and six children. When they arrived in Elk Grove, they bought “a small piece of ground” on which, daughter Mary Nason Kennicott told at an Old Settler Reunion, “there were potatoes and buckwheat and a few shoats thrown in.”

The family lived in a vacated log cabin until spring, when the father built a shanty.

“While we were living in the shanty, mother said it rained every night and she had to hang everything that was not in chests out next day to dry.” All cooking was done outdoors.

Mary Kennicott died in Arlington Heights at 101.

Another settler told of a brother losing half his left foot “by a breaking plow.” The father, to procure venison for him, traded flour with Indians who lived nearby in the grove.

The old people telling stories of their pioneering days obviously enjoyed the history they had lived.

Almeda Wood Dunton described how it felt to be the only family on the high ground between Elk Grove and Wheeling. “We came to this then-desolate prairie: no neighbors, no roads, nothing but a little house.”

Feeling the need for a little sociability, Almeda and William (later the first mayor of Arlington Heights) decided to visit his parents in DuPage County, 35 or 40 miles south of their stake.

“We had one horse but no sleigh.” So William Dunton (here we see the kind of enterprise that made him think of founding a village) “went to the grove and cut two long poles. He bent up one end in the shape of a sleigh runner and fastened them some way, making what was called in those days ‘a jumper.’ We took a dry goods box, fastened it to the jumper and made a seat inside so it was quite nice.”

They began their “wedding tour” in the morning and arrived at the in-laws at sundown. Thirty-five miles! When the old settlers told their stories in 1885, they spoke for themselves and for each other.

Now we know they also told them for us because their stories are our shared history and so affect our self-esteem, our control over our lives and our belief in our town.