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Writer's pictureROGER H. TALL, M.D.

CONFUSING ORIGINS





When I was born, I was given Hamilton as a middle name and told by my grandmother that I was Scottish. I was given the tartan of Lord William Hamilton of the Scottish lowlands. My family even bought the Hamilton Family Crest from some family crest company. I don't wear kilts, eat haggis, or drink Scotch Whiskey. However, I have a strange longing to attend the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and get goosebumps whenever a talented piper leads the processional at graduation ceremonies. This strong sense of Scottish heritage came more from what I had been told than from an intense study of genealogy. On the other hand, my sister, Marilyn is one of those people you see carrying in boxes of albums and loose genealogy papers to family gatherings. I am one of those people who turn into “The Invisible Man” whenever genealogy is mentioned. My behavior was so bad that my family thought the “end was near” when I was later assigned to be the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Idaho Falls Family History Center. I had to agree with them.


My mother, Eva Hamilton, met my father, Asael Tall when he was teaching violin in Sugar City. It only took her two violin lessons to realize that it was more fun to date the teacher than take violin lessons. When she tired of living alone, Grandmother Hamilton came to live with us in Rigby after being a widow for 32 years. It was like growing up with tag-team mothers. Whenever I wore one out, the other would jump right in. As the youngest child, after my siblings left for college, I was the only target on the horizon and never suffered from lack of supervision. In the evenings, I would sit on the floor at Grandmother Hamilton’s knee and listen to the stories and her loving advice as she hugged me and scratched my back. She would often recognize my overconfidence and bring me back to earth with pithy sayings like, “Remember who you are, Roger — and keep your hands to yourself.”


Grandmother Hamilton helped raise me for ten years and bore deep scars that were not visible. She had two sons who died before becoming adults. James died at age nine of kidney failure from membranous glomerulonephritis following a strep throat infection. Her other son, Don, had been killed in a motorcycle wreck after not following her advice and making some poor choices as a teenager. Her back scratches and talks amounted to transferrence. They were what she would have said to her own sons as she scratched their backs. At the time, I did not appreciate what it meant to be a young widow, left with six children during the Great Depression. Please read that sentence slowly again and let it sink in. Imagine being called upon to bury any of your children, especially as a single parent, alone, during a depression. Grandmother Hamilton only had two sons and had to bury both of them. I have seen their headstones by hers in the Sugar City Cemetery, and as a parent, can empathize with the unimaginable grief she felt. She never talked much about what she went through; it probably was just too painful to recall.


When I was young and impetuous, I had a short attention span and like most teenagers, preferred spending my time with the living. Headstones were just names on rocks, and I felt odd about developing a relationship with these people — who were dead, after all. However, I have found that all of my dead relatives are interesting, it is just that some are more interesting than others.



Two years ago I discovered incontrovertible genealogical evidence that I was not Scottish after all. Without question, Grandmother Hamilton was Scottish, but this was because of her maiden name, “Miller.” On the other hand, the name, “Hamilton,” was her married name and I learned that “these” Hamiltons all came from IRELAND! Grandmother Hamiltion had buried her Irish husband many years before and she never mentioned his ancestry. Mind you, most Hamiltons are Scotch, but my Hamilton lineage, and thus my middle name, is purely Irish — not that there is anything wrong with that — it is just that my Grandmother Hamilton had once said, “Remember who you are, Roger … ” without actually telling me who I really was.

Surprised while being ever vigilant, Roger Hamilton Tall

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