DIY History | Transcribe | Iowa Women’s Lives: Letters and Diaries | Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

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Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

Page 003

There must be some discrepancy between ancestry and progeny that is not always discernible. It was ever my understanding that I sprang from sound, sturdy normal Folks - a great deal of the Teutonic, a little English but mostly Scotch stock of exuberant animal vitality. But somewhere along the line of thinking this picture, something indeterminable is so illy out of focus. There must have been more than a throwback to produce such a one as I have turned out to be. The why and the wherefore - can it always or really ever, be traced? 
My direct forbears - the three grandparents lived to be over eighty; a fourth, as also my father after him demised shortly after middle age. At the death of my father, I was but a child then - the eight in his family of twelve. He died following an appendectomy but this was not the true cause. For he had lived for years with an intestinal disturbance and frequent hemorrhages which would indicate ulceration. From my father apparently is inherited this sensitive digestive tract which is mine. From my mother an excitability even more highly accentuated and a force and drive quite disproportionate to the nervous and physical constitution which have gone with it. 
To my father may be attributed at least some of his deep reverence of nature, a sincere love of the earth and the growing things and trees it produced, an ear for musical harmony, and a practical sense of management. To my mother I owe perhaps a fluttering emotionalism, the "green-thumb" that goes with a love of flowers and coaxing them into bloom, and a skill and manipulation of fingers for making things. She

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There must be some discrepancy between ancestry and progeny that is not always discernible. It was ever my understanding that I sprang from sound, sturdy normal Folks - a great deal of the Teutonic, a little English but mostly Scotch stock of exuberant animal vitality. But somewhere along the line of thinking this picture, something indeterminable is so illy out of focus. There must have been more than a throwback to produce such a one as I have turned out to be. The why and the wherefore - can it always or really ever, be traced? My direct forbears - the three grandparents lived to be over eighty; a fourth, as also my father after him demised shortly after middle age. At the death of my father, I was but a child then - the eight in his family of twelve. He died following an appendectomy but this was not the true cause. For he had lived for years with an intestinal disturbance and frequent hemorrhages which would indicate ulceration. From my father apparently is inherited this sensitive digestive tract which is mine. From my mother an excitability even more highly accentuated and a force and drive quite disproportionate to the nervous and physical constitution which have gone with it. To my father may be attributed at least some of his deep reverence of nature, a sincere love of the earth and the growing things and trees it produced, an ear for musical harmony, and a practical sense of management. To my mother I owe perhaps a fluttering emotionalism, the "green-thumb" that goes with a love of flowers and coaxing them into bloom, and a skill and manipulation of fingers for making things. She