Leonard Trawick wrote back promptly and said that his branch hailed from Alabama, was bad with money but good with words, and tended to be musical. “Yep,” I wrote back with confidence. “We’re definitely related.”
Having settled that, the correspondence ended — and that also, I would say, is fairly typical. We Trawicks tend to stay in the road, as Gran used to say, with our shirttails flapping in the breeze, and we don’t spend much time on correspondence. If we’re writing, it’s most likely columns, articles, or books.
The question is, how many generations of our family will know what Gran used to say, or what her mother said (for Mrs. Gober was well known for her one-liners, and was often quoted), or even who they were?
Our extended family deals with that question by having a reunion each year at which we share family lore, trade stories, and even create games that will perhaps keep our collective memories alive. We think of those memories as a gift that we hope to impart to the young people as they come along. We played Trawick Family Jeopardy at a couple of reunions, and this year some of us have been working on a board game about our roots in Commerce.
Yet most of us have relatively little interest in the big picture — the origin of the name, and how our little branch fits into the national picture. My cousin Barbaranne is an exception. She can give you chapter and verse about how we’re the sixth cousins twice removed of a man named George in Texas because Uncle Linus’s wife’s nephew’s child’s son married Aunt Marie’s husband’s brother’s second cousin’s niece and they had George. I’m not often given to vertigo, but a sentence like that will lay me right out; Barbaranne knows to stop when my eyes start rolling around like marbles.
Still, it interests me to know that the English Trawicks hail from Cornwall, in Great Britain, where the name is pronounced Trow-wick. It’s a fairly ancient family there, and — as in the U.S. — its members have tended to stay concentrated in one region. In America, most Trawicks still live in either Georgia or Alabama, and there’s only one other state (Texas) that has a sizeable number.
This year, I felt I should warn you, our reunion is taking place in Commerce — this very weekend, in fact. You probably won’t even feel the difference, though you may see us lollygagging in the drugstore, roaming around the mall, or taking up a lot of table space in Longhorn. We also plan an expedition to Helen (for tubing on the Chattahoochee) and an afternoon at Hurricane Shoals. We’ll go home feeling blessed to have each other as kin and friends, and maybe that’s what we’ll succeed in passing along.
Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.
