Memories of the citrus grove at our grandparents’ home at 501 North Vine Ave in Ontario, California shed light on our ancestry. One evening during a visit in the mid 1960s a tractor came down the alleyway and proceeded to plow trenches along the length of the grove. The entire process took perhaps an hour. I also seem to recall our Grandfather Joe having been on the telephone at the desk in the hallway nook earlier in the day requesting the man to come with the tractor.
A subsequent memory, although perhaps not from the same cycle as the trench plowing, was visiting the home on a Saturday that turned out to be irrigation day. For a couple of hours water magically flowed from the pipes at the west end of the orchard into the recently dug trenches–pipes that surely connected to the irrigation system built by the Chaffey brothers 75 years earlier. All morning and into the afternoon, Grandpa walked around in his boots using a hoe to channel water to the individual trees as it flowed down the trenches from west to east. As each tree received its share of the water, he closed off a little dam around it and move on to the next tree.
I don’t know how often this process took place, I would guess a few times a year. I only recall seeing it once or twice.
I believe that, with care, memories of the grandparents we knew can be transferred to the ancestors we never knew. We can theorize about characteristics handed-down and find support for these theories in family and genealogical records. We can thus capture “linked memories” of ancestors we never met.
Usually we look to each grandparent’s parents as the main source of inherited traits and habits. In the case of our grandfather Joe, the generational transference was more complex, and we have seen ample evidence that grandfather Joe turned out to be more of an even split between his father and father-in-law than just his father. Joe got much of his ethical compass from his father, Edward, but he was a banker and businessman very much like Henry Swan. Henry and Joe also both loved the citrus industry and were both spare-time fruit growers. Both men’s lives mixed the business world with home lives built around cultivation–lives where there were always ample quantities of fresh fruit on the back porch ready to be eaten.
The Vine Street orchard passed through three generations of our family. Both the Tuttle and Swan families, each having had a single female child, passed it down to their daughters’ families. Memories of the orange grove are also glimpses of the lives of our great grandfather Henry Swan and second great grandfather Barton Tuttle.
We know the Swans had servants, including a gardener, so it is hard to say whether Henry Swan, himself, trudged through the grove with a hoe, or supervised others in the process. But we know he had detailed knowledge of the industry which he applied to his business relationships with the growers he served.
Ultimately, Henry paid a big price for becoming too emotionally invested in the problems of the orange growers he served. Had he lived beyond 1924, Joe and Margaret would probably not have moved back to Ontario to take over the home and grove, and we would not have first-hand memories of the grove to link to Henry Swan.
Today the orchard is gone, as are most of the orchards of the San Gabriel Valley. About half the land remains as woodlands which still surround the home. Our memories of the grove, and linked memories of Henry Swan, live on.
Bridging the Silences 
I remember irrigation day, too. It involved getting up very early in the morning—I remember the hubbub in the pre-dawn hours, and I wanted to join in. Either mon or grandma told me what was going on, and told me to get back in bed.
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