52 Ancestors 2026: Tradition – Or Maybe Not

 

Growing up in Buffalo, I was surrounded by traditions, many of them rooted in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods. There were Italian festivals and foods celebrated each year, diners run by Greek immigrants, and the major Christmas Eve and Easter traditions centered around shopping at the Broadway Market. I learned to greet the various grandmothers—Babushka or Yia-Yia—who served as the respected matriarchs of multigenerational households. Since I got married, my own family now has absorbed and adapted many Polish customs, and we still enjoy celebrating those links to the Poland of around 1900.

At the same time, my family gradually let go of many of the Old World customs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became an amalgamation of cultures—fully American. Although some ancestors originally lived in émigré communities in the colonies, it did not take long for cultures to blend. A few family lines especially stand out, both before and after the American Revolution.

My paternal line began as various groups of Huguenots from France and Belgium who migrated to New Amsterdam, where they became part of a blended French-Dutch community. The Scots-Irish McWilliams family settled in a heavily German area of Pennsylvania, and over time the Highlanders blended with the Rhinelanders. Other German families, such as the Fasts, were more recent immigrants and probably retained more of their German heritage for a generation or two, something that even proved useful during the Revolution. The New England Puritan families were perhaps the group that remained the most English, at least while they stayed in New England.

After the American Revolution and the opening of lands west of the Appalachians, everything began to change. Being “American” increasingly meant becoming something distinct from European identities. The Huguenot-Dutch branch migrated together into Kentucky, but eventually settled in Ohio, where they intermarried with English families. The Scots-Irish-German lines married into families with Quaker roots, descendants who had left the Society of Friends. Even the New Englanders broadened their horizons as they moved westward and married into German families. Farming and rural life became the defining tradition for many generations afterward. Even the one nineteenth-century Irish immigrant branch assimilated within a generation.

The move to Buffalo, however, transformed a rural family into an urban one. Open fields were replaced by parks and parkways, and one-room schoolhouses gave way to large brick schools with wood shops, auditoriums, and swimming pools. Yet perhaps some vestiges of those older traditions remain. Although gardening and mechanical work are far less necessary for me than they were for my prairie-dwelling ancestors, I still find myself carrying on some of those habits today.

52 Ancestors 2026: A Quiet Life – Getting Away

 

As a city kid, I was always surrounded by noise—people talking (even when they were indoors and the windows were open), cars passing by, and sirens of every kind. That was not the case out on the farms, especially in the days before steam- and diesel-powered equipment. Out there, the sounds were more likely the lowing of cows or the crowing of roosters. I imagine that when my ancestors first made their way to the prairies of southwestern Missouri, they heard mostly the wind and the songs of birds.

I am hard-pressed to identify which of my ancestors truly lived a “quiet” life. There were daily farm chores, large families, and children constantly underfoot. Perhaps some of them stepped outside at the end of a long day and looked up at the stars, but they also viewed those wide-open prairies as land to be claimed and cultivated. Earlier pioneers saw the great eastern forests as sources of lumber and wilderness to be tamed, clearing trees so they could establish farms. Relations with Indigenous peoples, at times cooperative through trade, could also turn hostile, and dangers from wildlife such as bears and cougars were never far away.

For me, respite from the noise of daily life came from parks and campgrounds in landscapes long since settled. I have written before about camping, but there were other opportunities as well. As the City of Buffalo grew into an industrial powerhouse, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were commissioned to design a park system. It included parkways linking the Niagara River to various parks, with the crown jewel being Delaware Park, complete with a lake, wooded paths, and open meadows. It was along those parkways and in the parks that we played football, and where I spent time “in nature,” watching birds and learning to identify wild plants and trees.

Later trips to places as distant and remote as Algonquin Provincial Park offered moments of real solitude. More recently, parks and trails have been as close as my own backyard, where I would head into the woods on a brisk winter day, often with a young child strapped into a backpack.

I do not know how my ancestors felt about “getting away,” but my descendants have certainly continued the tradition.

52 Ancestors 2025: Off to School

 

September (now late August) is a time of hope, anticipation, trepidation, and often change, as children, adult students, parents, grandparents, teachers, and other school staff face a new school year. Education has been an important part of our nation’s history, from the founding of public schools in Massachusetts to the cutting-edge technologies being developed in our universities. But for a genealogist, school records can give us glimpses into our ancestors’ lives and their communities.

Being farmers and often pioneers moving westward, my ancestors faced challenges getting the now-standard K–12, let alone a university education. As far as I can tell, my family’s role in schooling began with my 3rd-great-grandfather, John Jay Fast (1814–1891), who exemplifies the 19th-century migration pattern from Pennsylvania to Ohio, then to Illinois, and finally to Barton County, Missouri. The 1889 book of Barton County biographies notes:

The eldest of this family, John J. Fast, was reared on a farm, and had very meager educational advantages, not attending school a year altogether. By private study, however, he qualified for teaching, and followed this profession for some time…He was the first treasurer of the Lamar school board…

So the Fasts appear to be a branch invested in public education, and that tradition carried on. My maternal grandmother, Ruby (Fast) Reed, was a schoolteacher in Barton County. After separating from my grandfather, Stephen A. Reed, she needed to support herself and her children and turned to teaching. According to the 1940 census, she earned $560 a year. Unfortunately, she died at the age of 60, with a memorial document noting that she was a fourth-grade teacher. My great-aunt, Mary (Fast) Hizar, was also a teacher. I remember her being intrigued by my Golden Book of Natural History, written by the remarkable (for me) science author Bertha Morris Parker. I left my book with her so she could use it in her classroom, and that Christmas I received a brand-new copy.

This brings us to my mother, Ruth, who also became a schoolteacher. She taught in a rural one-room schoolhouse, where children of all ages learned side by side. We have three school pictures (one is shown here) that appear to represent the years 1937–1939. At the time, she was teaching at Bryan School, which I was able to locate in Barton City Township, just down the road from her grandfather’s farm, where she lived with her mother. The children—some of whom appear to be siblings—would have walked or ridden in a wagon up to two miles each way. I have a book about Barton County schools that includes memories and pictures of those days. These one-room schools were essential to rural communities, but as school buses became common, they were consolidated, and the children transferred to schools in Liberal, Missouri.

Was my mother able to continue teaching after she married and moved to Buffalo? Unfortunately, no. City teaching positions required a college degree, and Mom had only a high school diploma with a few summer terms at Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Missouri State University) in Springfield. But once a teacher, always a teacher. She instilled in us a love of learning—always keeping books in the house, sending us to the library, and immersing us in cultural activities. All three of us earned college degrees, with two going on to PhDs and careers in biomedical research. In that sense, we were first-generation college graduates—or maybe not.

Mom was able to teach right out of high school at age 17, but as consolidation brought stricter requirements, Ruby continued her summer classes and eventually graduated from Southwest Missouri State College in 1951, at age 57. She was certainly a model of perseverance.

52 Ancestors 2025: Home Sweet Home - The Neighborhood

 

One thing I’ve learned in my research is that farming was practically universal among my ancestors—even those who lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn had farms. Occasionally, there was a mill, but generation after generation, they were primarily farmers. With farming came a tendency to move westward, from the original colonies into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and eventually Barton County, Missouri.  

So how did "Home, Sweet Home" end up being a city home for me? Like many farm kids, my father sought new opportunities in factory work as the country ramped up defense production before World War II. He found an airplane mechanic’s school in Buffalo, NY and eventually landed a job at the Bell Aircraft Plant, assembling P-39 fighter planes. In the summer of 1941, he married my mother, and they settled about a mile and a half north of downtown Buffalo, near the Elmwood Avenue streetcar line, which took him to work.  

After a few moves, the family settled in a neighborhood off Elmwood Avenue, about a mile north of their original home. Elmwood was a bustling street, and as free-range kids, we could walk to church, school, the library, grocery stores, and all kinds of shops, all under the majestic elm trees—until Dutch elm disease wiped them out in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving the neighborhood looking barren. The streets were filled with families with school-aged kids, and we had nearby Olmsted-designed parkways and Delaware Park for bigger adventures. While we lived on the edge of an Italian neighborhood, our community also included refugees who had fled war-torn Europe—a theme that seems to echo throughout my own family history.  

This kind of walkable, mixed-use urban living is what modern urban planners advocate today—though thankfully, with less pollution! It wasn’t sterile, high-rise public housing, but older homes that required upkeep, especially in Buffalo’s harsh weather. Today, older industrial cities face challenges as manufacturing declines, but many neighborhoods still thrive. And as climate change becomes more evident, cities like Buffalo could become destinations for future generations.  

Now that I’ve moved around the country, I still feel most at home in cities, walking the streets and visiting local stores—though my love of gardening remains a vestige of my farming heritage.