Ancestry Magazine

What makes a perfectly reasonable family shuck indoor plumbing, fast food, and cell phones to live as pioneers in west Texas? The same thing that drives a museum curator to turn Buffalo Soldier and a college student to relive World War I—a desire to immerse themselves in family history.

Lisa Cooke knows firsthand that there’s some good in television. Just a year ago, her family may not have whole-heartedly agreed.

It was at about that time that they were tossed into the desolation of west Texas—for the uninitiated, an area straight from an old Western where the desert prairie stretche s on, uninterrupted save the occasional cactus or coyote, forever.

“I knew this wasn’t going to be a John Ford movie, but come on,” Cooke says today, laughing. Whether willingly or out of obligation and necessity, she and her family rapidly became initiated and spent the next three hot, dry, hard months living like pioneers.

The prospect of surviving a summer, solo, in west Texas started months before as Cooke was watching TV. She heard a call for people to apply for a new PBS show, Texas Ranch House (premiering May 2006 on PBS), the next segment in a series of reality programs including Frontier House and 1900 House, that meshes modern mindsets with historical lifestyles. She was immediately intrigued. But Texas?

“At first I thought ‘eww, Texas?’ It sounded hard,” says Cooke. But family history got the best of her—members of her own family had settled in a nearby area in the middle of the nineteenth century. They were some of the hardest family she’d ever attempted to research, and, truth be told, she gave up on them shortly after starting. “The records down South on my ancestors were just so sketchy. It’s not an area I concentrated on that much,” she says.

But a television show? “I’d been craving something that would add real context to the lives of my ancestors, and there’s no other way to do it than to live it,” she says. Besides, what were the odds that she’d be picked?

Pretty good, it turns out. Next thing Cooke knew, she was asking her husband to take time off work and telling her three teenage daughters—the excited fourteen-year-old, the willing seventeen-year-old, and the reticent nineteen-year-old—that it was time to pack. “Really,” she says, “what else are you going to do this summer?”

Reanimating Lives
There’s no monetary prize at the end of Texas Ranch House. “You&r squo;re not going to win a million dollars,” says Cooke. You do it because you want to understand an ancestor, how life was for the people who shaped your history.

Jenny Thompson, whose study of military reenactors resulted in the book War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-Century War Reenactors (Smithsonian Books, 2004), says it’s that same motivation that pushes almost every reenactor.

“With war reenactors,” says Thompson, “you have an intricate grouping of people coming from all backgrounds. The reenactors who had relatives [who served in the war], who have items or objects that their relatives had, feel closer to those people. They’re kind of honoring their memory. They’re not reenacting as their relative but as a tribute to that person.

“One guy, whose great uncle was in World War I, told stories about this uncle,” says Thompson. “His family history was so important to him. [As a reenactor] he could explore and find out something about his family that made him feel a lot of pride in his stories.”

Texas Tech University’s History Museum Curator Henry B. Crawford spends an occasional weekend as a Buffalo soldier. “It’s fun,” he says. “There is nothing like reliving historic events at places where they actually occurred.”

As a reenactor, Crawford knows how stepping into a single moment of an ancestor’s life can affect someone. “During the filming of the movie Gettysburg, the scene of Picket’s Charge was filmed on the spot where it happened, with permission of the National Park Service,” he says. “I have friends who participated in that filming whose ancestors took part in the actual charge. I have heard many stories of reenactors being in tears when the scene was done—it was such a powerful moment for them.”

A Dirty Job
Even with the cameras rolling, reliving an ancestor’s lif e is anything but glamorous.

Once in Texas, Cooke quickly realized that cameras were secondary to her family’s experience. “I didn’t go in with this mythology. We’d seen Frontier House. I had down-to-earth expectations,” she said. She knew it would be tough and gritty. But she admits that at first, she didn’t know how anyone would even be able to secure 47,000 vacant, undeveloped acres in Texas—until she saw the land and wondered who would possibly want to live on it.

As for life beyond the ranch, there was really no time to consider it. “It was a two-pronged experience,” Cooke says. “There was the experience of being in a television show and the experience of being in 1867. But as much as you’re trying to stay in tune with what’s going on [in the production], you still have to survive and get dinner on the table. It’s really hard work.”

Crawford agrees. “The camera doesn’t really disrupt you but you are aware of it,” he says. And there may be a little comfort in knowing that no one is going to let you die on screen.

For twenty-year-old college student Greg Kelley, retracing the steps of a pair of relatives who served in World War I also helped him appreciate just how cushy life is now.

“We were placed in tough circumstances,” says Kelley, a participant in the upcoming Canadian television series The Great War. More than three hundred this-generation Canadians were chosen to participate in the project, each one approximately the same age of their ancestor while serving in World War I. For Kelley, a history major at McGill University, the transition from the twenty-first century back to 1917 was definitely noticeable.

“We were better fed than the troops would have been,” he says, noting that rations weren’t comparable to a good home-cooked or even a school-cafeteria-cooked meal. “We ate a lot of bully beef”—canned, pickled beef. Conditions, too, were also less than desirable. The participants fought for highly interrupted sleep under the stars and the rain; stood watch; lived in small, primitive, leaky tents; marched; relived battles from the trenches; learned fear and fatigue; and existed as much like the soldiers they represented as possible.

“It was very muddy,” Kelley, one of the younger participants, says. “But we got a brief glimpse of what it was like for our ancestors.”

Emerging Knowledge
Kelley’s situation was unique. He had published memoirs to accompany him on the reenactment, The Great War as I Saw It, written by his great-great-grandfather, Canon Scott, Chaplin of the First Canadian Division. But before being chosen to participate in the project, Kelley hadn’t read them.

“Reading the book was always on my to-do list, but my family’s version was old and frail. Eventually I went on Amazon and bought a reprinted copy of the book,” he says. In the field, he carried the memoirs with him.

“Before the project, most of what I knew was just kind of very basic, just stories. I was told about my family background here and there,” Kelley says. “I went to the McCord Museum [of Canadian History in Montreal]. I went through the research and letters [my great-great grandfather] wrote home. I did the same with my great-great-uncle. I spoke to my great-aunt and great-uncle about what he was like. I really got a sense of who they were.”

Kelley used the memoirs for basic details and points of reference. But when the group arrived in Ypres, Belguim, the words took on deeper meaning as Kelley revisited them as a soldier.

“I retraced a lot of my great-great-grandfather’s steps,” Kelley says, “and could compare everything with what he wrote. It was very neat to be following in his footsteps and to get that firsthand knowledge of the war. It helped me understand what he went through.”

Kelley was chosen for the project because of his interest in history and his well-known great-great-grandfather. But his most insightful moments may have come in relation to his great-great-uncle, a soldier who died and was buried in Europe while serving for Canada during the war. Kelley visited the grave.

“He was a lawyer. He was sort of interested in the same things as me, in history,” says Kelley. “But visiting my great-great-uncle’s grave . . . I realized he’s so far from home. It’s not easy for my family members to go visit him. Here’s someone who was very close to his own—my own—family, and he’s lying in a foreign grave in a foreign country. Only my great-uncle and I have been there to see him.”

Taking and Remaking History
“[Reenacting] adds a dimension to learning that cannot be provided through books and lectures,” says Crawford. “Historical reenacting gives us an opportunity to try to relive the experiences of someone else . . . within the context of his own time and place. Living history truly brings the past to life.”

For Cooke, reliving family history also meant debunking misconceptions. “All of us have been through census records. There are occupations for men, but the women are always ‘keeping house,’ and the daughters are helping the mother. You kind of become numb to that. But the women—it was such an intense job.”

Day in, day out, simply surviving was hard work. Cooke had to make everything from scratch—food, clothes, you name it. “It’s up to you if you’re going to improve something,” she says. As basic as the work was—sustenance the prime motivator—it never let up. When the sun set, the family was still hungry, dirty, exhausted, spent.

The work, however, was also eye-opening. “What men accomplish ed in their trailblazing was really a partnership with the women,” Cooke says. “Every aspect of it for the men was such an intense job. What man would want to go out in 110 degrees with just a canteen? It was critical that our female ancestors kept a home and that they kept it happy to come home to.”

In the end, like Kelley, Crawford, and virtually anyone who has spent a portion of their own life reliving an ancestor’s, Cooke walked away from the experience with a greater hold on what it meant to be her ancestor and developed a closeness and gratitude to family—both here and gone—far beyond what would have existed otherwise.

“I came to understand why when I go back just a couple of generations, I keep seeing references to [my ancestors’] faith,” she says. “I came to understand what their faith meant to them. These are women who had to lean on God to get them through each day.”

And today? “We came out of the experience a stronger family—stronger and more bonded,” says Cooke. “We found out how much we really liked each other, how capable we are. It was amazing. You get out there and realize you’re a speck. It’s very humbling. But, as my oldest daughter says, ‘I’m glad that I did it.’ And, absolutely, I would do it again.”

Jeanie Croasmun can be reached at jcroasmun@ancestrymagazine.com.