Girls of Taylor

I’m “that” person in the family who fell down the rabbit hole of our family’s stories. The beginning of that Alice in Wonderland adventure started when I took German in seventh grade.

My great-grandfather Sachs had not permitted his children to learn German. You are Americans now, you speak English!, even though he barely could. He kept his small journal and business documents in German. After his death, his children—my grandmother and her siblings—found letters from German cousins, all in German of course, that he had never shared with them.

Once my German improved to the point that I could read those documents, I shared my translations with family members. I used business trips to visit and memorialize the Sachs hometowns—Hof, Töpen, Münchenrenreuth (near Mödlareuth), Hirschberg, Magdeburg, Pankow in Berlin. I have mountains of paper worthy of Henry Louis Gates.

In fact, when I tracked down living cousins in Regensburg during one of those trips, I told them things about our mutual great-great-grandmother’s story. I sent them photographs of the family celebrating weddings or births. Two world wars had destroyed their albums and correspondence.

As I prepared for the grand reopening of our genealogy and translation services earlier this year, I’ve been working through the branches of our family tree about which I know relatively little. My Sachs grandmother married a Heap from Taylor, Texas. My mother’s Norris and Kelly and Light families settled in Stephenville, Martindale, Georgetown, Alice, and Victoria after moving around—a lot.

I’m therefore relearning Ancestry’s software by redoing and expanding my own family tree.

This has meant pulling out scraps of paper and copies of newspaper articles and photo albums related to non-Sachs families. The Heap side, for example, followed the venerable “oldest child of the oldest child of the oldest child of the…” principle. Where I have Sachs photos and documents because I could speak German, I have yearbooks and silver services and sundry Heap stuff because of that principle. It’s odd actually, because I’m oldest great-grandchild, oldest grandchild, and oldest child on every side of our bizarre family tree.

Among the Heap material: My paternal grandfather’s high school and college yearbooks. He graduated from Texas A&M in 1929, so his was the last set of yearbooks with gold-leaf gilt edges. The Great Depression not only rendered gold-leaf too expensive, but post-1929, Aggie yearbooks were only half the length of prior years’ annuals.

Although it was fun seeing photos of that grandfather in the Aggie Glee Club (he could sing?!), his high school yearbooks fascinated me even more. He was Class of 1925, Taylor High School.

If you know much about central Texas, you’re aware how utterly racist and misogynist that part of the world has become. For decades, the NAACP has had one lawsuit or another filed against Williamson County, Texas for blatant and egregious acts of racism. If you’re not lily-white and evangelical, Williamson County in general and Taylor, Texas in particular can be difficult (understatement). It's also difficult for whites who are not evangelical. Ask the members of the local Disciples of Christ church!

Cracking open those 1915/16-1924/25 yearbooks provided such a contrast! The Class of 1916 saw themselves as “socialists,” working for the downtrodden. They baked “Social Reform Cakes” and their parents voted for Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate. The “white” high school held joint events with the “Black” high school, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. No one protested those events!

Taylor High School offered bilingual classes—German and English—to handle the influx of immigrants to that town. When World War I came to a close, Taylor included women in their lists of and memorials for World War I veterans.

The yearbooks announced the arrival of new teachers, one of whom was an outspoken suffragette. Before 1925, Taylor High School dropped German as the bilingual language and substituted Spanish-language classes. The world had already begun to change, even in Taylor.

What struck me most, however, was the high profile of those Taylor girls. A girl chaired the debate team. Year after year, girls graduated at the top of their class. Girls organized political rallies and featured prominently in The Cotton Boll, that annual.

Mildred Smith (’17) described herself as a “militant suffragette.” Margaret Griffith was their award-winning writer with clear leftist leanings. Julia Machalek authored the piece on their “Social Reform Cake.” Olga Menn impressed everyone in Taylor with her mathematical prowess. She would go on to earn her PhD in Math in Chicago. And Lila McCarty edited the yearbook. Her dream? To become a TCU professor—riff ram bah zoo!

Genealogy entails far more than just adding the next leaf onto your family tree in Ancestry. It’s even more than determining whether that particular name is really part of your family history, or whether it’s another person entirely.

It’s writing your family story, catching glimpses of the authentic individuals whose DNA and traditions and beliefs and illnesses and superstitions contributed to the person you are now.

For me, one of those glimpses was seeing that my great-grandmother Lizzie Vanelia’s maiden name was Trump. The air was momentarily blue in my little home office from all my cussing. Surely not!

And with a sigh of relief, surely not. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all born and raised in the USA, her great-grandfather (my great-great-great-great-grandfather) from Pennsylvania in the 1760s. Not one of them named Trumpf.

In fact, I’m having a hard time getting my non-Sachs families out of the US. They mostly came over quite early. Except for the Heaps, from Rochdale, near Manchester, England.

These stories make the drudgery meaningful. Because yes, it can indeed be drudgery to click on silly leaves, trying to verify whether that Walter Heap is the right one, and then chasing more rabbits to double-check. (There were multiple men named Walter Heap in Rochdale, all of the same age! And don't get me started on the many, many John and James Heaps in or near Taylor, Texas!)

I’ve long espoused the use of family trees and the sources used to create them as a writing tool for historical fiction or creative nonfiction. In August 2000, Institute of Children’s Literature in Connecticut published my how-to, “In Gramma’s Attic, On Family Trees,” with recommended techniques, along with publishers who were interested in such material.

I still recommend genealogy as a writing tool. But in our increasingly chaotic world, learning one’s own family stories seems to give us an anchor.

If you decide you want to learn your family stories, I’d love to help. Just be aware that your family may not always appreciate the true stories you’ll uncover. My grandmother did NOT like learning that her father was the third child of her German grandparents. She’d thought he was Child #2. Records indicated that Child #1 died during childbirth, and her grandparents had not married until Child #2 was two months old. Her father was the second surviving child.

For her Texas sensibilities, that was a bridge too far. But. Part of who “we” are.

Because: Mixed in with those oh-really flashes are also the moments you stumble across the girls of Taylor. Girls who were a century ahead of their time. Girls whose dreams of Math PhDs and TCU professorships paved the way for this granddaughter of Taylor who studied Mathematics (and German) at TCU.

And in my book, that’s a story well worth saving.

Questions? Comments? Go to our Chat Room!

Return to Finding Family index.

No part of this post may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.

My paternal grandmother LaRue Sachs visiting future in-laws in Taylor, Texas in 1929. Photo (c) John Heap, Sr. 1929.