The Norton Post: A Blended Heritage

Christmas, circa 1940s, Cummins household

To get our family history and background, I have had many conversations about it with my mother on my mother’s side. Like me she loves the stories about the family and talking about family history. A few years ago, I copied off all of her old photographs and have uploaded them.

Ernest and Golden Cummins

I was born in Laredo, Texas in 1954, having moved to Michigan as a young child. Muskegon, Michigan is a medium sized urban port city on the Western shore of Lake Michigan. Laredo is a small town that borders the United States and Mexico. It was rural in the early 1950’s but is now a bustling city that has seen much growth. After growing up here, I decided to stay in the Muskegon area to raise my daughters because of family and because the city schools were seen to better than the rural schools in the area in addition to it being closer to working as a medical transcriber at a local hospital for many years. My Great-Grandfather Jose Cisneros, was born in 1918 in Joyce, Texas, a small village that washed away in a flood in the early 1960s, leaving no records. He came to Michigan in the early 1940s to find work in the pickle fields, going to Crystal Valley, where he met my mother, Alice Cummins, who was born in Crystal Valley in 1922. Crystal Valley is an extremely small rural area in Northern Oceana County, Michigan. The Great Depression was going strong when they lived in Crystal Valley, thus the family made brine pickles and sold them door to door on a wagon.

The house on Albert Avenue, Muskegon, Michigan

The first of the Cummins in America was Isaac Cummins of Ipswich, Massachusetts who is said to have come on either the Gifte or the Talbot George ship in 1639 in the wave of immigrants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because of exile or escaping religious persecution. The first Cummins who came to Michigan was Benjamin Cummins born in 1772 and moved to Michgan from New York State when Michigan became a state in order to gain a land grant, settling in Richland, Kalamazoo County. Benjamin was a Ferrier, a person who shoes horses and a soldier in the war of 1812. Family oral history says he was the inventor of the circular saw but did not patent it. The predominate language spoken by grandparents and great-grandparents was English, although their remains a few idiosyncrasies in certain words that have remained such as mother’s use of the word “squeejawed” which is found to be from the Massachusetts area. People in Michigan tend to use the word “kittycorner” to mean the same thing.

The Family gets a new car (Golden on rt, Alice rt in car)

Many family members came to reside in the Muskegon area to work in the foundries. Like many others, I stayed in the city because family ties, better education for children, and being closer to the availability of work. My father, both grandfathers, and grandmother all, at varies times throughout their lives, worked at the foundries and factories within the city of Muskegon. The pull was better pay than rural manual labor and better living conditions for the families and offered more opportunities for financial security as Muskegon was a growing city due to the automobile industry, and later making turbine engines and components for the war effort. Grandparents Ernest and Golden Cummins came to Muskegon after their farm in Crystal Valley Oceana County burned and Ernest found work at Continental Motor Company and retired there in the late 1950s. My father most likely chose farm work when coming to Michigan because of his lack of a formal education, thus was not able to find more than menial labor. He did face discrimination in the form of not being served when he went into Muskegon restaurants in the 1940s. But before coming North, he worked at a Smelter in Laredo, and was noted to have helped unionize the workers. This smelter closed down. This may also have prompted his coming North. Some of the challenges and difficulties faced by great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents was the poverty caused by the Great Depression. Grandfather Tomas Cisneros who was originally from Villa Mina, Mexico, was said to have immigrated to America to avoid the political conflicts and to avoid being conscripted into the Mexican army. Benjamin Cummins, great-great-grandfather, left New York with his 22 children, wife with his belongs by wagon to buy land in Michigan.

Alice Grace Cummins Cisneros, age 21

The concept of the “melting pot” is the idea that the diverse groups of people with differing ethnicities, backgrounds, or religious differences should assimilate and meld into the surrounding culture, thereby losing their former identity, language and traditions and forming a new coalesced one. The melting pot was the ideal notion that it was best for everyone within the society to blend these different identities and make them into one distinct identify or people. In this case: American. This is compared to the idea of a “salad bowl” whereby these diverse groups of people retain more of their original identities, language, culture, and traditions and is more pluralistic, with these different groups coexisting in the separate identifies.

Tomas Cisneros (seated) Jose on rt.

I consider our family more in line with the “melting pot” ideal because most of our traditions, celebrations, and this culture does not differ much from the rest of what other Americans. We typically celebrate holidays such as the Fourth of July by shooting off fireworks or having picnics. We celebrate Christmas and Easter very similar to everyone else in our community and involve very few traditions that would have come from the ancestors, except perhaps in some traditional foods that we make on certain occasions. These traditions or celebrations are only spoken of or noted as a matter of passing interest, perhaps reminiscing about what the great-grandparents did in times past but not really incorporating them into our own traditions. Most of our family traditions are relatively new, being handed down from grandparents only, except for particular foods. Thus, culturally our family has only retained our connections to former countries of origin in the form of certain types of food we eat; such as the making of stuffed cabbage from grand-mother Goldie; tamales from grandparents with Mexican roots, or the making of traditional Scottish shortbread from mother, Alice Cummins or chicken and dumplings from Grandmother, Golden Cummins. While they may seem trivial, in some small way it continues to give us a sense of home and heritage in keeping these in the family. It is still a connection to the past. Thus, culturally we have assimilated into what is considered this melting pot of America into a unique identity combining my Polish, Spanish, Mexican, and Scottish heritage.

Clan Cummins Tartan

I am grateful for my family’s diversity with ties in various generations to France,England, Ireland,Germany, Scotlandand Mexico, America. Like many others, we fit into the same melting pot as other immigrants as well as for similar reasons; economic opportunities. They also immigrated to avoid the hardships of their native countries, or were forced out of their countries due to political strife or warfare: The Scottish exiles and removals, the Polish Diaspora in the 1890s, and the Bracero programs of immigration in Mexico in the 1930s up to the 1950s. This combination gives me a sense of pride to know the hardships my ancestors endured in order to forge a way in this new land, how strong they were to have survived the hardships in order to try and make a better life for them and their children. While this is not a concise genealogy, it does give a general idea since many ancestors have passed and with the generations getting older, it is more difficult to sort out each individual and where they lived at certain times of their lives. It was only through my mother’s memory of them that I was able to get a sense of who they were.

This is the time of year where favorite family memories are the in the uppermost part of our minds. I sincerely hope that you are able make your own cherished memories this year with friends and family for tomorrow's generation. -Marie Helen