Viewing page 1 of 20

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[marginalia]] [Louise Gilbert] 
my mothers ancestors 
originals (? [[/marginalia]]

RADICAL ELDERS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
First interview: February 1, 1979
EMMY LOU PACKARD - early years

Q: When and where were you born?

A: I was born on April 15, 1914, in the city of El Centro, Imperial Valley, California. At that time my father, Walter Eugene Packard, was in charge of the University of California agricultural station in the Imperial Valley. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, He graduated from Iowa State University at Ames in 1907, with a degree in agricultural science. He received his master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley two years later. In Imperial Valley his work pioneered the introduction of successful farming in that region. While at Ames my father had met and married my mother Emma Leonard (1909). My sister Clara Eleanor Packard was born in 1910 in Pasadena.

I think my answers to your questions about ethnic background, class consciousness and religion will be more interesting if I quote from a few ancient letters written by and about my ancestors. My maternal grandmother at the age of 80 (1922) wrote a 48 page letter telling what she could remember of her life in County Carlow, Ireland. Her name was Sophia Maria Smith. (The name was originally Schmidt and the family were Dutch Huguenots who fled to Ireland because of religious persecution.) My grandmother Sophia's letter tells something about her own grandparents. Grandfather James was a bearer of dispatches in the time of the Irish Rebellion. His wife Elizabeth Salter James lived to be 90 and raised seven children. They could not be educated because Grandfather James had died and she had little money. But her daughter (Sophia's mother) spoke of her with much "love and reverence, and quoted her so often that her son said "Grandmother and Soloman were the greatest men that ever lived.". Sophia remembers that when she was about seven they lived in a house called Ballintrain house near Carlow, the county seat. "The house was one storey with a thatched roof. In the center of