ORIGIN STORY: My Great-Grandfather’s Farm
Knowing our past roots us firmly in the present. Knowing our past informs the future. I am lucky to have a long line of ancestors in the local cemetery. Here’s a documentary about their story.
Ray O’neal above Spader Bay, Chelan, WA
DEEP ROOTS: The Early Years on the O’neal Ranch
I have built the foundation of my life on stories. The stories of my mother’s parents, Ray and Jessie O’neal, and their siblings especially informed how I see the world.
The documentary DEEP ROOTS (view below) captures much of these stories. It explores life in the Chelan valley in the 1920s and ’30s. It explores a dirtier, harder, and more uncertain life than many of us experience today.
Learning these stories broadened the horizon of my life. I saw my origins spanning two, three, four generations back. And I could see the influence of my life extending to future lives.
But the biggest gifts of my family's stories were grace and forgiveness. Frustrating elements of my own childhood had origin stories beyond mom and dad, beyond grandpa and grandma. I found no source, just well-intentioned, very human people, doing the best they could.
The Land Today
Through an uncanny string of events, I found myself back on my great-grandpa’s original farm in 2013 as the first employee of the Lookout at Lake Chelan. Like all sectors of society, agriculture had changed mightily in the eighty years. The highest and best use of the land had changed as well. Homes were to replace the farm.
Such a transformation would have been met with judgment from my younger, bearded self. But I had farmed with my father since making the documentary and understood the economic realities of change. I wrote an op-ed for the local papers in 2015 when the apple trees were pulled out. The essay honors both the reality and the loss of that time.
About the Film
The documentary is just over 35 minutes long. I produced it with a Canon VX-2000 and composed the script and score.
This was a very early creative expression. Broken Limbs was still a few years in the future. Be prepared for low production standards and a hippy-bearded narrator.
I hope it inspires you to record a few of your own family’s stories. Recording family stories has never been easier. A simple technique is to purchase an inexpensive lapel microphone, plug it into your iPhone, record using the Voice Memo app (or equivalent Android app), and upload to the cloud for your family to enjoy. You will be glad you did.
With all of this said, please enjoy DEEP ROOTS: The Early Years on the O’neal Ranch.
