My parents are Brian Howell Schweickart and Cynthia Daphne Gates. They married in 1978 and raised three children, including me. Their life together connects the Schweickart and Gates sides of this family history.[1][2]
Cynthia and the family we belong to
The family chart records my mother’s full name as Cynthia Daphne Gates and her birthplace as Detroit. John’s biography records her marriage to Brian in 1978, with Albert and Eleanor’s support, and follows their family into the next generation. The photograph above preserves another moment in that shared life, more than twenty-five years after their wedding.[1][2][4]
Through my mother, the Gates family record is part of my history. Through my father, the archive reaches into the Schweickart, Howell, Wiseman and Stewart families. Brian and Cynthia’s household brings those branches together in the family I grew up in.
Brian: learning to build
My father’s own words add something a family chart cannot. In his April 2008 tribute, Brian remembers Albert patiently teaching him electrical work and general construction. Trips to the lumber yard included scrap wood for Brian’s small projects. Birdhouses were one result. He also remembers being able to ask for help with work on his own house when a job exceeded his skills.[3]
These are memories of learning by making things, with time and patient instruction behind the finished work. The family biography carries that practical support into adulthood: Albert and Eleanor helped their sons with their first homes in Allen Park and with improvements afterward.[2][3]
School, tennis and time together
Brian entered Western Michigan University in 1968. The biography describes the next four years spent earning his degree. His tribute also remembers the hours Albert spent teaching him tennis, a sport that continued into the next generation. Swimming, a backyard skating rink and family vacations belong to the childhood he describes alongside those lessons.[2][3]
The values he wanted to pass on
Writing as a father himself, Brian returns to the example his parents set at home. He remembers Albert greeting Eleanor after work with a kiss and says their affection became the model of love he tried to follow. His tribute closes with the hope that he had passed some of Eleanor’s love, joy and values to his own children.[3]
The same account remembers me and my siblings sitting with our grandmother while she read to us. My father preserved that memory as part of what she gave the next generation. His writing lets me follow the family history through his eyes: the skills he learned, the home he remembered and what mattered to him as he raised a family of his own.[3]
A few moments in their story
- 1968 · Brian at Western Michigan
- The family biography records the beginning of his university years.[2]
- 1978 · Brian and Cynthia marry
- Their marriage connects the two sides of the family represented in this archive.[2]
- 2005 · A photograph together
- The couple portrait preserved in the genealogy is the photograph shown above.[4]
- April 2008 · Brian looks back
- His tribute records what he learned from his parents and what he hoped to carry into his own family.[3]