Our Pear Tree

Bright and early this morning, Kathleen Davies and Nancy Allen are coming to have their picture taken with our pear tree.  Cate Gable will be photographing them for her next week’s column on their Heirloom Fruit Tree project.  Hunting down and documenting the heirloom fruit trees in Pacific County is an ongoing Community Historian enterprise for Kathleen and Nancy.  They’ve been working on it for more than a year.

That our pear tree qualifies, I have no doubt.  My mother, who was born in 1911, remembered it being here “always.”  It was part of an orchard along the south part of the Espy property and could well have been planted by Tom and Anne Crellin who built the house in 1869 and lived here for a decade or so.  The tree still bears fruit – Bosc pears as hard as rocks.  “Only suitable for stewing,” said my mom.  “Or for the birds.”

House with Orchard c. 1900

Truth to tell, the birds aren’t crazy about those pears either.  They take a peck or two and that’s that.  I have a vision of slightly bent beaks among our feathered population.  Our four-legged visitors, though, gobble them right up if we don’t think to clean up after the first big winds of September and October.  Kathleen tells me that next fall she will be collecting pears to try out my grandmother’s Pickled Pear recipe and to save and preserve some of the seeds.  A worthy project, indeed!

Speaking of projects, later today, I’ll be working on a heritage tree of another sort – my family tree on the ancestry.com site.  Though my genealogy has long been clear on both my mother’s and father’s sides, in many cases back to the seventeenth century – thanks to the diligence and passion of my mother’s brother Willard and my paternal grandmother Molly – the records are in narrative form.  They are hard to follow and difficult to read since many of the earliest accounts are in longhand.  Plus, in many cases they start with the now and go backwards.  And not always in a continuous line.

Pears for Breakfast

I decided that I would try to fill in the traditional family tree template offered by ancestry.com.  Presumably, it will give a clearer picture of my forebears and may be useful in finding “long lost” branches of the family.  However, just on the basis of the information I originally supplied ancestry.com, I have 5 ‘close’ matches (all of whom I know) and 364 matches in the 4^th to 6^th cousin category, most of whom I don’t know and certainly more than enough to keep me busy should I want to make contact.

The Espy/Little branch of our tree, ends with my son Charlie – at least as far as I know to date.  But… that’s probably what our pear tree thought, too.