How Did These People Ever Cross Paths?

Tracing the Powells, Pattersons, and the miles of mystery between them

I don’t even know how or where my Grandpa Powell and Grandma Powell met, which feels like a wild thing to admit out loud, seeing as I’ve built an entire personality around knowing this stuff. This feels like something I should know by now, considering how much time I’ve spent digging through this family, but I don’t.

My working theory is Washington. My grandpa was in the service and spent time stationed there. I believe my grandma was part of a military band, although I still haven’t nailed down whether she was actually enlisted or just showed up and played the trumpet at people. I do know she was in that band with her sister Wilma, and both Wilma and their sister Dorothy served in the Navy, so at least somebody in that family had their paperwork in order. I haven’t found anything proving my grandma was actually enlisted herself, and I don’t fully understand how women serving in military bands worked back then, so that’s another rabbit hole waiting for me. What I do know is that she grew up in Oklahoma, and when I follow the records and the timeline, there’s no obvious reason she would’ve ended up in Missouri early enough to meet my grandfather there. So I keep landing on Washington. Right now, though, that’s exactly what it is: a theory held together with duct tape and vibes. And it is driving me nuts.

The more I research this family, the stranger it gets because the two sides could not have been more different. Like, “one of these is clearly adopted” different, except nobody was adopted. They’re just built like that. On the Burgdorf side, my mom was one of six kids. They grew up in the Baden neighborhood of St. Louis, went to Holy Cross, and were staunchly Catholic. Family was everywhere. Aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, everybody knowing everybody, with gatherings, shared traditions, familiar neighborhood places, and this whole built-in community keeping everyone tethered together like family Velcro.

Then there were the Powells and Pattersons. I barely knew them at all. They might as well have been folklore. When I first started researching the Powells, Crawleys, Pattersons, and Turners, I assumed I’d eventually find the geographic thread that explained everything. Surely they all lived near one another at some point. Surely that’s how everybody met. Nope. The Powells and Crawleys were tied to Bourbon, Missouri, while the Pattersons were up in Howard County. They weren’t in the same community at all. Add Oklahoma and Washington into the mix, and suddenly I’m staring at a family tree that requires an actual road map and possibly a search party. Even if my grandma had already returned to Missouri by the time they met, I still don’t know what would’ve put her in my grandfather’s orbit.

My dad being an only child probably didn’t help keep those family connections alive, but I’m starting to think the bigger divide may have been religion and lifestyle. From what I’ve found, I believe the Powells were Pentecostal. The Pattersons were either Methodist or Mormon. I need to go back through my research before I commit to which one because I refuse to turn my own fuzzy memory into somebody else’s future “family fact. “ That is exactly how family lore gets started. Somebody’s great-great-granddaughter is going to build an entire personality trait around my guess, and I won’t be around to stop her.

What I do know is that my Grandpa Powell joined the military, spent time in Washington with my grandma, and eventually they settled in St. Louis. Their life there wasn’t particularly religious, and they never went back to Bourbon to live near the rest of the Powell and Crawley family. I only remember meeting that side once, about thirty years ago, when we drove down to Bourbon for a family reunion. I still have the photo of all of us standing together at that little place where it was held. One picture connecting me to an entire branch of my family who, for most of my life, were basically strangers wearing our same last name.

My Grandma Powell’s side wasn’t much different. I remember her sisters Dorothy and Wilma, the same Wilma she played in the band with, and Uncle Jim, who I finally figured out really was Uncle Jim. I remember him being tall and heavy-set with long, scraggly, almost mullet-looking blond hair, the kind of haircut that has its own zip code. This is what genealogy does to you. You start with names and dates, and suddenly you’re trying to identify a man you saw thirty years ago by his mullet, like he’s a cryptid and you’re the one person on the internet who swears you saw him.

I hate guessing. I hate forcing pieces into a puzzle when they don’t actually fit. Actually, never mind. I love puzzles. I do. Apparently I just prefer the ones that don’t fight back, unlike this family tree, which fights back constantly and possibly bites.

The deeper I dig, the more I wonder whether the distance between these branches wasn’t entirely accidental. There were strong religious roots running through these families, with some relatives eventually ending up all the way out in Yakima, Washington, which honestly sounds made up at this point. My grandparents, meanwhile, seem to have stepped outside that world entirely. My grandfather joined the military, married my grandma, a woman from completely outside his immediate community, and they lived out west for a while before eventually building a secular life in St. Louis instead of returning to Bourbon and the family network he came from.

I can’t prove religion caused the separation. That would be filling in a blank I don’t have evidence for, and I’ve already told you what happens when people start filling in blanks without evidence. But I can see how it could have happened. One branch stayed rooted in close-knit religious communities, surrounded by extended family and shared traditions, while my grandparents went another direction entirely. By the time my dad came along as an only child, that distance may already have been wide enough that the next generation simply inherited it, like a family heirloom nobody asked for but everybody got anyway.

And then there’s me, decades later, trying to figure out how people attached to the same family tree ended up living in completely different universes, with one side feeling like a cozy holiday movie where everybody knows everybody and the other like a movie where nobody can even agree on the plot. Maybe that’s the part of genealogy I find most fascinating. A family tree can tell you that two people married. It can tell you where they were born, where they lived, when their children arrived, and where they were buried. It does not, unfortunately, come with a “how they actually met” footnote, which feels like a massive oversight on somebody’s part.

And here’s the part I can’t fully explain even to myself: for whatever reason, I feel more connected to the Scots-Irish side of this family than the German side, even though the German side is the one that actually showed up for me. That’s the side I grew up knowing. Those are the people whose traditions and relationships were actually part of my life. Yet here I am, constantly pulled toward the other side, trying to understand people I barely knew. And now I’m about to have a granddaughter who’s going to call me Omi, a German word tied to the heritage I somehow feel less drawn toward. Family doesn’t seem particularly concerned with making sense. Sometimes the family you knew best isn’t the history you’re most curious about, and sometimes the people you barely knew are the ones who leave the biggest unanswered questions. It just does whatever it does and hands the pieces down anyway.

As for how my grandparents actually crossed paths? That part is still hiding from me. For now. I’ll find it. I always do. Eventually. Possibly out of spite.