Every family has a history, but remarkably little of it survives unless someone makes a deliberate effort to preserve it.
Names and dates may remain in official records. Photographs may survive in boxes and albums. A few letters, recipes, certificates, newspaper clippings and treasured objects may pass from one generation to another. But the connections among them—the stories that explain who these people were, how they lived, what mattered to them, and how their lives shaped ours—can disappear surprisingly quickly.
The Chanticleer Project comes from my own experience exploring my family’s heritage, and it is being developed to help others discover and preserve those connections in their own families.
You do not need to be a genealogist. The objective is not simply to construct a pedigree reaching as far backward as possible. It is to make the generations immediately behind us knowable to the generations coming after us.
My grandparents, Damon Sidney Hawkins and Delia Ann Burkhead, courting in 1923
Why Chanticleer?
Our emblem takes his name from Chanticleer, the magnificent rooster at the center of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. He belongs to an old literary tradition.
Chanticleer is wonderfully grand and wonderfully ordinary at the same time. Chaucer gives this barnyard rooster a court of seven hens, of whom his favorite is Pertelote. He has a beautiful voice, strong opinions, family memories—and enough vanity to get himself into serious trouble with a fox. Chanticleer has a lineage, but he also has a household. Those aren’t quite the same thing. Family history isn’t merely a vertical chain of ancestors. It’s siblings, spouses, children, neighbors, places, animals, work, quarrels, jokes—the little court in which a life actually occurred.
It’s in this context that we’ll excavate photographs and remember those stories from our own family legacies.
CONTACT
mistral.kip@gmail.com: 949-500-6479
M.A. English/UCI Irvine; B.A. English/Concordia University, Irvine.