See the general note

In 1945 my Grandpa, Frederick Wilson Hawes, and Grandma, Anna Martha Franz (Hawes), sold their burdensome chicken ranch on Waunch's Prairie and squeezed themselves and their belongings into a small house on Gold Street in Centralia, Washington. A year later, my Pop (my new stepfather) moved my Mom, my sister, and me into a house he had just bought on Silver Street, less than a mile from Gold Street.

We spent a lot of time at the Gold Street house. I remember how, as a wide-eyed four-year-old, I sat on my Grandpa's lap while he told me fantastic yarns of his supposed Indian-fighting adventures in the Old West: "And there I was: There were Indians in front of me, there were Indians to the right of me, there were Indians to the left of me..." He would pause and stare out into space.

"What happened then, Grandpa?"

"Well, just then a big wind came up and blew my hat clear off. I had to go chasing after that hat, and I never did find out what happened!"

My Grandpa was quite a character. He had been part of the 1889 Oklahoma land rush but hadn't been old enough to hold on to his claim, he had been a cowboy, he had been a Texas lawyer, he had been a Rough Rider with Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish American War (see the picture of him that was on the home page), and-- sadly-- he had been a chronic alcoholic.

His decades of problem drinking caught up with him in the late 1940s; he plunged into decline, frittering the last couple of years of that decade and his life in a mental hospital. After he died in 1950, my folks cleared his things from the back bedroom of the Gold Street house.

Treasures of his long life were tucked into the cubbies of the old oak desk he had always used: letters from Theodore Roosevelt, samples of the tack from the family harness shop in Oklahoma, a "Hawes and Hawes" business card for a real estate, loans, and insurance concern he had operated with his brother during the World War I years, a corncob pipe, a tin or two of Prince Albert tobacco, and a box of cigarette papers.

But my Mom knew that something was missing. Where had Grandpa stored his twenty-five-year effort to trace the Hawes genealogy? She knew there had to be a sizable carton somewhere. She looked everywhere she could think of. She even contacted the new owners of the ranch, who were kind enough to check all the many nooks and crannies of the farmhouse and all the outbuildings. No luck, nothing there either. Apparently, the F. W. Hawes version of the family history was lost forever.

Meanwhile, Grandma, in her late seventies and early eighties, lived contentedly alone in the Gold Street house, thriving as a gadabout widow with her friends from the Ladies Auxiliary of the Spanish American War Veterans and from church. Every Sunday she would drive my sister and me to Sunday school in her green 1950 Dodge Meadowbrook with its "fluid drive transmission" and its smart visor shading the windshield.

Grandma had been tough all her life. Born in Bismarck's Germany, she had immigrated to the U.S. in steerage at the age of six with her parents and siblings. In her teens, in the 1890s, she had worked in Connecticut textile and paper mills at 5 cents an hour for 10-to-12-hour days, losing the tip of her right index finger in one of the machines. At the beginning of the new century she had been a "Gibson girl".

Later, as a wife to my wayward and cavalier Grandpa, she had single-handedly taken care of the health and welfare of the family, even on a homestead in the northern Saskatchewan wilderness. (You can see a more detailed story of her.)

She well remembered before cars and planes and all the Twentieth Century wonders, but she loved the newfangled things-- especially TV-- and she collected piles and piles of stuff. As a child visiting her at Gold Street, I remember navigating paths through the stacks of old papers and magazines, some stacks higher than my head. But in the midst of the accumulation, my Grandma was independent.

Some practical things were beyond her, though. One severe summer rainstorm in the mid-1950s flooded her Gold Street basement. Pop came over in his hip boots and started the sump pump. After the weather cleared, he and Mom spread the soaked articles in the backyard to dry. What didn't seem to matter much-- for example, an old five-gallon milkcan-- they lifted up and placed onto the dirt of the half basement behind a six-foot retaining wall. More years went by.

In 1965, long after my sister and I had left home to become grownups, Grandma, nearly ninety and at last too frail to live alone any longer, moved into my sister's old room in the Silver Street house to share her time with Mom and Pop. The Gold Street house was put on the market, its contents dispersed to the family.

To make very sure that nothing had been left behind, Pop took a last roam through the empty rooms. He checked the back of all the shelves, under the basement stairs, and---

He reached over that six-foot retaining wall in the half basement. He could feel-- but not see-- something metal to the touch and cylindrical in shape. Getting a ladder, he looked into the semi-darkness. A five-gallon milkcan? How odd! Heavy, too. Pop wrestled the can over the retaining wall to the basement floor.

The can was rusted closed. Pin holes in the metal indicated that the milkcan had been in the dampness a good long time. My ever-handy Pop owned a myriad of magic potions that enabled him to fix almost anything. He applied many de-rust remedies and softening compounds as he attempted to remove the milkcan lid ...

The can was filled with a sodden mess of papers. All Grandpa's genealogical writings, the research, the correspondence, the answering letters, the officially reproduced documents, and lots of odds and ends, were damp and molding and rotten.

Now Mom sprang into action. She sandwiched everything she could between clean white paper towels, spreading the papers over every available surface so they could air-dry. Once dried, the papers were extremely fragile; they easily became dust when handled. An excellent typist, Mom began to transcribe as fast as she could. She rolled onionskin typing paper-- with six carbons per page-- into the family typewriter, a portable manual Royal, and set out to salvage her father's effort, organizing it and inserting her own editorial comments along the way.(1)

Mom distributed copies among her siblings and cousins. One distant cousin got wind of this work, tracked Mom down, and shared more information about that branch of the family-- even sending a photograph of Grandpa's dad, Frederick Webber Hawes, when he was a boy. Delighted, Mom gathered all this material together into a family book.

Television was invented for Grandma. She enjoyed it so much! She would sit by the hour in her favorite chair watching her soap operas, doing needlework and, from time to time, reading a bit. Whenever the pile of newspapers and magazines at her side got shoulder high, Pop would scoop up the top eighteen inches or so and burn them in his backyard incinerator.

Uh oh. Grandma had been reading the family book Mom had put together, and Pop scooped... A few days later Mom looked for her book. She finally found just the metal part of the three-ring binder in the ashes. She wept and wept.

Cousin Dick Hawes shared his carbon copy, however, and Mom began to re-retype Grandpa's family history. Through correspondence, she and Dick reorganized the work. They needed a name for these "family papers," the messy treasure that Grandpa had left behind secreted in a milkcan, so they turned to a recent Cold War story of some other famous hidden documents: the nefarious Pumpkin Papers. What better name could Mom and Dick choose for the newly exposed special papers that had been hidden decades before in old milkcan on the Waunch's Prairie ranch? The Milkcan Papers.

As a title for this Web site and as a domain name, I am using the term Milkcan Papers in a very broad sense to include all the papers left behind by my children's ancestors, not just those that my Grandpa Hawes stored in the old milkcan. On the other hand, I also use the term in a very restricted sense, to refer just to Grandpa's original narrative, Our Family, by One of Us, with occasional footnote gloss commentaries.

Enjoy!

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