Stories That Live In Us

Their Love Stories | Episode 46

• Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist • Season 1 • Episode 46

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Do you know how your parents met? Research shows this simple story could be the key to building family resilience — and in this intimate solo episode, I open up about three generations of love stories that shaped my own family's legacy.

From my grandparents’ powerful wartime romances to my parents' whirlwind 19-day courtship, each story reveals how family connections are forged in both dramatic and everyday moments. Along the way, I explore fascinating research from Emory University showing why these origin stories matter so much, regardless of how they end.

Join me as I demonstrate how uncovering and sharing your family's love stories — whether epic or understated — can strengthen bonds across generations and create a deeper sense of belonging for everyone in your family tree.

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🖼️ Ready to turn your family discoveries into a beautiful conversation piece? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Crista Cowan:

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. Can change everything. About two decades ago, emory University did a study that said that children who are raised with family stories are more resilient and have higher self-esteem. In the ensuing two decades there have been other studies that have been done that have proven that that research was true. Brigham Young University just came out with a study that said that it's not just children, that young adults also, who are raised or discover family stories, that they also have increased levels of resilience and self-esteem. One of the interesting things to come out of that study was a list of 20 questions that you can ask your children do you know this thing about our family? And if they answer yes, that gives them kind of a score about how resilient or how high of self-esteem they are likely to have based on that research. The number one question on that do you know list is do you know the story of how your parents met? One of the things I find interesting about that research is that it doesn't even matter if the stories are good stories or bad stories. The key is making sure that the children know the stories. So if their parents are no longer together, maybe even went through a bitter divorce, doesn't matter. Do you know the story of how your parents met? If their parents are still happily married and they demonstrate that, often doesn't matter. Do you know the story of how your parents met?

Crista Cowan:

Well, I was raised with the story of how my parents met. Not only that, I was raised with the stories of how my parents met. Not only that, I was raised with the stories of how my grandparents met. Now, these two stories I'm going to share with you, but they're a little different, and they're different for a couple of reasons and I want you to see if you can tell the difference. Listen for that. And I don't think that one is better or worse than the other. They were just different experiences. And then, as I share those, I want you to think about how you share those stories in your own family. Or maybe there's different ways you can share those stories so that your children and your teenagers and your young adults as they head into their own relationships, have some kind of a foundation to build on with an increased amount of self-esteem and resilience.

Crista Cowan:

So here's the first story my mom's parents I always called them Nana and Grandpa Woody. Now my Grandpa Woody died when my mom was only 17 years old, so I never knew him as a matter of fact. My mom only knows him through the lens of a teenage girl and she loved her daddy and always had great stories to share about him. But she never shared with me the story of how her parents met as a matter of fact. I don't know if she knew it before I started asking questions. Maybe she did. My Nana lived alone, never remarried, and it's funny because when you think about your grandparents I think you always think of them as old. But now that I'm in my 50s and I look back and realize that my grandmother was 50 when I was born, it kind of changes my perspective about what old means. As you walked into her home, just to the right of the entry there was a little den and hanging in the den was a full-size painted portrait of my grandfather and she talked about him and she shared photos of him and he was very much a presence in her life, even years after his death. I don't remember exactly when I first asked her about their love story, but I do remember that the pieces have come together in my mind and that by the time I was a teenager I could tell the story. And here's how the story goes.

Crista Cowan:

They both were born and raised in northwest Arkansas. My grandmother was born in a tiny little town called Green Forest. My grandfather was born in a town called Montanay that actually doesn't even exist anymore because a river got dammed up and now it's at the bottom of the lake. They went to different high schools. They did not know each other growing up. They did discover later that they had some friends in common, but after high school they were both still very active in community sports. My grandmother was a volleyball player and a softball player, my grandfather also. When he wasn't working because it was the depression and they were pretty poor. My grandfather's family, he also was involved in community sports, and the way my grandmother tells the story is that she was playing a softball game and he watched her play and asked some friends to introduce them, and that's it. That's the story.

Crista Cowan:

Now I know a little bit more about their love story. But when you ask about how they met that's the story she tells oh, we met at a softball game and it wasn't till later that I realized oh, she was the one who was playing softball, not him, and, you know, tried to ferret out the little pieces of the story and that's what I got from her. Now she does talk about how, very shortly after that, he joined the military. As a matter of fact, we're pretty sure he lied about his age so that he could get into the military, because he needed to get away from kind of an abusive home situation and his older brothers were all married and starting families and he had stepmothers that were not kind and a father who was very authoritarian. And so he joined the military and World War II was underway and it wasn't long before he was sent off to basic training and then sent off to Brownsville, texas.

Crista Cowan:

Now, in that same period of time my grandmother was looking for work and of course, with the war effort going on, she had the opportunity to work in a lot of places. She did go up to Michigan for a while to help her sister with a baby, but eventually she ended up out in California where she worked in a factory there. But she and my grandfather kept up this communication and correspondence and she took a train to Brownsville, texas, where she married him shortly before he shipped out to Europe to fight in World War II. She then went back out to California and kept working until he came home from the war and he also then moved out to California where they settled in Long Beach and that is where my mom and her older sister were born and where she was raised and shortly after, where my grandfather passed away. So that's my grandparents' love story. That's it and literally all I could get out of my grandmother.

Crista Cowan:

Now I've been able to talk to my mom and her sister and some of the cousins and learn more about him as a man in the years. But as far as their love story in the years, but as far as their love story, that's what I know. And yet somehow it's enough because I can picture them as teenagers in love, with a war raging, having had some difficulties in their growing up years and clinging to each other and then making this choice to build this life together. And maybe I've romanticized just a little bit how much in love she was with him because of that giant portrait in her den and the fact that she never remarried. But I love thinking about their love and I fill in the gaps because I don't have a lot of information. Now, my other grandparents it's an entirely different story. Not only is it a different story, but my experience of their story is entirely different Because my dad's parents were alive for most of my life. My grandfather didn't die until I was in my late 20s.

Crista Cowan:

My grandmother just passed away a few years ago when she was in her late 90s, and their love was always on full display for everyone to see. They held hands, they square, danced together, they kissed my grandpa called her Swittert, which was his way of saying sweetheart and they just enjoyed being around each other, and when you'd ask them about their love story, they would share the details. So a couple of years ago, after my grandmother passed, I decided I wanted to write down their love story Because I wanted to make sure that I captured all of the details that I remembered. But I also wanted to talk to my dad and his siblings, my aunts and uncles my grandmother has a sister-in-law who's still alive people who knew them at the time that they met and fell in love and got married. I wanted to make sure that I captured all of the details from all of the perspectives that I could and wrote them into a story that could then be passed on, not just verbally but also attached as a document in my family tree to my grandparents, so that anybody who came along and found them would know this story. So I don't do this very often, but I'm going to read you what I wrote, because there is value in oral family history absolutely. But I think it is imperative that when we can, we also write it down, because oral history can get lost so easily. And so here is the story of how my dad's parents met In the summer of 1942, world War II was raging across Europe and the Pacific Islands.

Crista Cowan:

Six months earlier, the United States had been thrust into the war. On the day that will live in infamy, in factories and shipyards across America, women went to work to support the effort by doing the jobs of the men who had been called off to war. Sitting behind a clerical desk at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles, 19-year-old Doris was no Rosie the Riveter. She came to work each day with her brilliant red hair done up in the rolls and waves and pomp of the day. Her knee-length skirt pressed and starched and the seams in her stockings running in a perfectly straight line up the back of her knee-length skirt pressed and starched and the seams in her stockings running in a perfectly straight line up the back of her legs. For someone raised at the height of the Great Depression by parents who were poor dairy farmers and not so great with the little money they had, this job must have been something new and exciting. During the war, douglas Aircraft produced nearly 20% of all the planes used in the war effort. The facility where Doris worked, on Ocean Park Boulevard, just a little north of the Santa Monica airport, was covered in camouflage that summer to avoid detection from enemy air forces. In fact, all of the Douglas facilities in the LA area were, which was tricky because at the same time, they were expanding the size of their facilities to account for the fast growth required to ramp up production, an effort that would, within just a year or so, employ more than 160,000 people. One of those people was Grace, a 25-year-old single girl with a flair for the dramatic, who quickly became one of Doris' best friends. Doris called her Gracie and Gracie called Doris Red.

Crista Cowan:

The ongoing construction that summer of the 1 million square foot aircraft assembly building and the special projects building used for classified projects by the Navy meant that architects, draftsmen, engineers, various construction personnel and government inspectors constantly needed access to blueprints, exterior elevation drawings, shadow diagrams, floor plans and landscape designs. The hundreds of pieces of 24 by 36 paper required to detail a construction site of this magnitude was carefully cataloged and secured in a file room. When one was needed, it had to be ordered, pulled and signed out. When it was returned, it had to be signed back in and refiled. Red and Gracie had the tedious but physically undemanding job of managing that process, along with the rest of their regular office duties. With so many of the young men in their age off to war and so many of the young women their age working at the physically demanding jobs of aircraft construction, red and Gracie appreciated that they worked in a mostly quiet, mostly orderly environment together, where dozens of men came in and out of the office each week to check files in and out. They admired, they flirted and every once in a while they caught a glimpse of a kid that seemed a little closer to their age than the rest and had, as Red described it, a very cute butt.

Crista Cowan:

Some tedious jobs can be delightful if you have the right kind of personality Gracie did. She could make just about anything fun. Red was more of a practical sort. She took great pride in a job well done. She appreciated efficiency above all else. She also had a brain that just naturally kept track of random statistics, like which of the men on the job site placed large pull orders or repeated pulls of the same files. And one name came up over and over again Fred C. One day, in a fit of frustration, while tucked in the back of the filing room, she must have said something loudly to Gracie about the inefficiency of this Fred C. Why was he endlessly checking so many things in and out the same files over and over again? Couldn't he just get what he needed, get the job done and move on to the next thing? And he must have overheard her.

Crista Cowan:

Fred Cowan was a 20-year-old draftsman, an artist with a brain for all things mechanical, who worked in the engineering department at Douglas. He had a baby face, a twinkle in his hazel eyes and a notorious penchant for teasing. Though his father, a World War I veteran, was the head of the local army recruiting office, fred had not joined up immediately, but had instead registered for the draft and entered that period of anxious waiting for his number to be called. Shortly following Red's rant, he came into the office to drop off another stack of papers to be filed. But this time he sought her out personally, introduced himself as the notorious Fred C, handed her a bottle of Coke, winked and walked away as he did. Her jaw dropped when she realized that not only had he overheard her but he was the kid with the cute butt. After several weeks of flirting in Coke bottles and teasing, he finally asked her out.

Crista Cowan:

Fred Cowan and Doris Mulliner were married the next summer, july 25, 1943. Seven months later he enlisted at Fort MacArthur to serve for the remainder of the war. She continued to work at Douglas. She bought a house less than two miles away from work and found a few roommates to help pay the mortgage while he was away. Two miles away from work and found a few roommates to help pay the mortgage. While he was away he served in both the European and Pacific theaters. When he came home he got a job in city planning with the city of Los Angeles. They had four children. Over the next eight years they moved from Santa Monica to a new subdivision in the Valley. They celebrated 57 years of marriage before Fred died.

Crista Cowan:

She lived another 18 years without him, but almost every single time I visited my grandmother in those 18 years she would talk about the boy with the cute butt who brought her Coke and teased her and everyone else and built a life with her that she loved. I can't ever get through that story, even though I wrote it, even though I lived it and watched their love. Maybe that's why I have always felt so grounded and rooted in their love story and in the home that they built and the family that they created and the way that love spilled over into everyone and everything else. Not all love stories are that epic, but I'm grateful I have one example of that in my family my other grandparents' love story. It wasn't tragic, but it just was so sparse and yet still has value. Now.

Crista Cowan:

The question from the Emory University study was do you know the story of how your parents met? And I've just shared with you the stories of how my grandparents met because they were very much a part of our family narrative. We talked about those things, we shared those stories, we asked them to tell those stories because that was important for us to hear as kids, but we were also raised with the story of how our parents met, and my parents' love story is also a fun one to tell. So my mother was born in Long Beach, california, and my father was born in Santa Monica, california, and raised in the San Fernando Valley, and they did not know each other growing up. My father served an LDS mission in Texas from the ages of 19 to 21. And my mother, who joined the LDS church, decided to go to Brigham Young University as a freshman and then she would come home in the summers and I think she was in her. She finished her freshman year and was home for the summer, and my mom's best friend that she had grown up with was engaged.

Crista Cowan:

Jeannie was engaged to a man named Tim, and Jeannie and Tim were planning a wedding for the following January, and my mom that summer got to know a lot of Tim's family, his parents and siblings and some of his aunts and uncles, and she spent quite a bit of time with the two of them and some of his aunts and uncles, and she spent quite a bit of time with the two of them. Well, as 4th of July weekend rolled around, tim and Jeannie decided that they wanted to take a road trip from Southern California up to Salt Lake City. Tim had an older sister who was living there with her husband and I think that they had a child or two by then and he wanted to introduce his fiance to his sister and brother-in-law and they were going to make a whole four-day weekend road trip out of it, and they invited my mother to come along and invited her to bring a date. So my mom got a date and they planned this trip, and the night before they were supposed to leave my mom's date had to cancel on her. If I remember the story correctly, I think he got chicken pox, which sounds terrible as a 20-something-year-old, and so then she didn't know if she should go or not, because now she's going to be this third wheel with this engaged couple, and she just was hesitant and then they kind of talked her into it, and so I think that the plan was she was going to bring some stuff for the fall back up to school, since they were going to have to drive through Provo on their way to Salt Lake City. And so she's like oh well, you can just drop me off and I'll stay with one of my old roommates and I'll take some stuff in the car so that I don't have to bring as much stuff when I go back up at the end of August, bring as much stuff when I go back up at the end of August. And that was kind of the plan, but she still wasn't quite sure. Anyway, tim finally just said hey, you know what? I have a cousin and he just got home from his mission two weeks ago and he would love to come to Utah and see family that he hasn't seen in a couple of years. Now.

Crista Cowan:

My mom was not overly thrilled with that, because she did not find Tim attractive which is good because he was engaged to her best friend. But her thought process was surely anyone related to this man is not going to be attractive to me either. And so she just kind of stuck with her plan in her head. She was going to just to ride in the car to Provo and then just spend the weekend there and they could pick her back up on their way home. In addition to that, the next morning when they came to pick her up, she was wearing sloppy clothes and she'd packed sloppy clothes and she had no makeup on her face and her hair was in pin curlers because she wasn't interested. She didn't care and as she walked out into the front room and took one look at my dad, she squealed. She yelled at Jeannie to grab her suitcases so she could repack cute clothes. She ran back into the bedroom, ripping pin curlers out of her hair and putting on her face, and that was all it took for her to like be interested in being dropped off in Provo to spend the weekend. She instead wanted to spend the entire weekend with them and she did so.

Crista Cowan:

My parents' first date was four days long and it was a blind date and they visited my dad's cousins and they went up to the Lagoon, which is an amusement park with a water park. And back in 1970, you had to rent a bathing suit in order to enjoy the water park facilities. And her saying always was if he could see me in a rented bathing suit and still be interested, I should probably keep him. He always talks about how seeing her in that rented bathing suit and realizing that all five foot seven of her was mostly legs was what interested him. But they spent that whole weekend together. And then the drive back down and my mom said she just knew. She knew she was going to marry him, that this man met everything that she had been looking for and she was falling in love with him. It took my dad a little bit longer to come around. He proposed to her 15 days after they got home from that trip and they got married six months later one week before Tim and Jeannie got married.

Crista Cowan:

Now my parents' love story is fun to tell the story of how they met and fell in love and everybody always gasps like they knew each other for 19 days before they got married, yes, or before they got engaged. They were only engaged for six months. For some people that seems so fast and it probably was. That she had already been in a serious relationship where she had been engaged and her fiance had actually been killed in a motorcycle accident. Like this was a young woman who had been through a lot and that a lot. Some people could view as she needs to heal from those things before she makes life-changing decisions, and some people might view that as she had to grow up really fast and she learned some things about herself and about the world and she matured in a way that made her prepared to make that decision.

Crista Cowan:

I don't know which camp you fall in, but I know my mom well enough to know what camp I fall in, and my mom has always seemed like an old soul to me, and I don't know if she always was that way or if it was her life experiences that made her that way. But they then proceeded to build a life together, and their life has been less than perfect for a multitude of reasons, and their love story has been less than perfect. But as a child growing up in that home, not only was I raised with the foundation of that story, I was also raised with the knowledge that they loved each other, and that took on a million different forms. There's one thing about my parents that I've always appreciated, even if I was a little embarrassed about it as a child Whenever we pray in our family, whether it's a prayer over a meal before we eat, or whether it's kneeling down together as a family before we go to sleep at night, or in the morning before we head off to work and school, that was something that we did consistently in our family.

Crista Cowan:

Head off to work and school, that was something that we did consistently in our family and after every single prayer, and they do it to this day my parents, who are next to each other, holding hands, turn and kiss each other.

Crista Cowan:

I don't know where that started, I don't know why that started, but as a child, to watch that and to watch that consistency, even knowing they might be fighting, there's tension, there's things happening in both of their lives, with careers and family, and all the drama and trauma of life that they still were consistent about prayer and about that connection, that moment of connection in that moment, that was really important to me as a kid.

Crista Cowan:

Now my parents are celebrating 54 years of marriage and, as an adult, watching their relationship has also reminded me that, though their love story looks very different than my mom's parents or my dad's parents, though it may look very different than the love stories I'm watching unfold with my siblings and their spouses, or even my friends, some of whom are no longer married to their spouses, that just understanding for kids, that moment of connection, that spark of whatever that starts a family, there is something very grounding about that. So that's the story. Those are the stories of how my grandparents met, that's the story of how my parents met, but it's also their love stories and however those stories look in your life. I hope you find a way to record them. I hope you find a way to share them. And the research shows that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the stories are happy or if the stories don't have great endings. The important thing is that we share the stories.

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Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist

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