Folks often ask the question, "do you remember where you were and what you were doing?" when they recall momentous, and often infamous historical dates during their lives. Today, we observe the 50th anniversary of that terrible day in Dallas, Texas, where President John F. Kennedy was gunned down during the prime of his life. Since I was a 6-year-old kid back then, I believe that I may be one of the youngest persons alive who can actually recall that time. Most anyone who was younger than five or six back when JFK was assassinated is unlikely, I believe, to have any memory of it.
During the fall of 1963, I had entered Kindergarten at a suburban St. Louis grade school where I went to school for just half the day in the morning. So on that infamous Friday 50 years ago, I had apparently just gotten home from school when the shots rang out. I don't recall what I was doing when it actually happened, but I do remember my mother being very upset later that afternoon when she told my older brothers upon returning home from their schools that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I wasn't sure what that word meant, but I knew it was something really awful because when she said it, she was crying. (By the way, a family friend took the photo of me displayed on the right on Thanksgiving Day in 1963, which was less than a week after the assassination.)
Perhaps, it's more accurate to state that I recall the events during the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death, than the actual, horrific deed itself. Many historians believe that JFK's assassination ushered in the age of television news. Fifty years ago, three broadcast networks basically dominated television, and all three, CBS, NBC and ABC, were giving this story wall-to-wall news coverage. As a result, my next memory of that time came on the following Sunday (November 24). While televised live before a national audience, JFK's accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was fatally shot while police were transferring him to the county jail. I can remember vividly my mother shrieking in horror as my family and I watched this attack unfold before our eyes on our black-and-white TV.
The next day, November 25, 1963, I can remember watching the wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral procession, where a riderless horse was pulling a carriage holding JFK's flag-draped coffin to Arlington National Cemetery. I remember wondering what kind a man was Kennedy at the time. After watching John-John's iconic salute to his father's coffin, I began wondering about his kids who were about the same age as me. I wondered if they were sad as the concept of death was still pretty new to me.
The Kennedy assassination had a profound impact on me. Beforehand, all I knew was basically my family, my school, and my dog.
But afterwards, my concept of the world increased exponentially. For the first time, I discovered the existence of news, history and the politics that shapes them. Moreover, the Kennedy assassination made me aware of my own mortality.
My maternal line tells a story that begins not just centuries ago, but deep in the Ice Age.
Through the magic of mtDNA testing, the kind that traces a direct line from mother to mother across thousands of years, I’ve learned that I belong to haplogroup U4a2. This lineage reaches back roughly 13,000 years to the hunter-gatherer women of northern Europe, who lived in a harsh, glacial landscape at the end of the last Ice Age. Over time, their descendants adapted, settled, and became part of the early populations of central Europe, eventually finding roots in what is now Switzerland.
By the 1700s, my maternal lineage could be documented.
ROSE JONELY
The story begins in Bern, Switzerland, with Christina Hoffman, born in 1724. From her, the line continues through generations of Swiss daughters, Anna Wyttenbach, Barbara Streit, Elisabeth Hadorn, Elizabeth Trubel, and Rose Marguerite Jonely, women who lived their lives in the heart of the Swiss Alps.
With Rose Marguerite Jonely, my second great-grandmother, the story takes a dramatic turn. Around 1880, Mormon missionaries persuaded her family to leave Switzerland and begin a new life in Idaho. That journey across the Atlantic marked a turning point, but not a break in the chain.
In Idaho, the next generations, Rose Vaterlaus and Laura Louise Burnside, carried the lineage forward. Laura, my grandmother, lived in many places, but one constant remained: the passing of that ancient maternal thread. She gave birth to my mother, Margaret Josephine Kelley, who in turn passed it on to me.
So my maternal story is an epic journey: from Ice‑Age Europe, to the Swiss Alps, to American life, an unbroken chain of mothers and daughters stretching across centuries.
