ROOTS & BRANCHES

I spent a couple of columns recently musing about people who affected my life so profoundly that I call them “chosen family.”
But what about my blood relatives, particularly my parents?
Well, I’m fortunate to say—and it’s taken me well into adulthood to realize that what I considered “normal” is actually pretty abnormal—that both my parents gave me unconditional love in abundance.
My mother, Mildred Mae Hiester Beidler, was born on June 4, 1927, and lived in the house in which she was literally born (no hospital deliveries in rural areas back in those days!) until she went to a nursing home a few years before she died.
I used to call her “the smartest person who never went to college,” because I’m certain she would have done so and excelled had she been born a generation later. Instead, she was a bookkeeper at the old Reading Trust Bank in Berks County until I came along (A standing joke of my childhood was running into someone while out doing this or that errand, me asking who that was, and her responding, “Oh that’s a girl I used to work with.”).
Her church, Bern Reformed United Church of Christ, was the center of her life, and at one time or another she held basically every post worth having at the church.
One of her most ironic moments at church was when, as consistory president, she signed the documents dissolving the union church with the Bern Lutheran congregation after 160 years. One of her great-great-grandfathers, Peter Kerschner, had been a signer when the union church came into being in 1836.
And it was helping her write and edit a 250th anniversary history book on Bern Reformed that spurred my own interest in genealogy when I said “I want to take a walk to the Bern old graveyard”—it’s less than a mile from the house in which I was raised and now live again—and as I am wont to say, “I never really came back from that graveyard,” since there were no less than three dozen direct-line ancestors of her and me buried at Bern.
Mom made a killer blueberry coffeecake and her simple fried chicken recipe (just Bisquick and a little salt and pepper) was a staple for me at the time I was one of the world’s most finicky eaters.
She lost her mother to tuberculosis when less than a year old, but other relatives pitched in to give her a great foundation. She was salutatorian of her eighth-grade class at the old Bern School, having missed the era of one-room schoolhouses by just a few years.
Did she have flaws? Sure, and I’ve acknowledged some of them as I’ve learned more, but I won’t be telling you about them.
That covers my mother. Next week you’ll learn some of my favorite memories of my father, with whom I had significantly less time.