Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Text] un film de (a film by)
ryan lelache
[Voices try to pronounce 'Lelache']
This is my name.
Same as my father before me, and his father before him.
I was never really sure what it meant.
My parents told me once that it means mother's milk.
As it turns out, that's not the case.
They'd gotten it confused after getting a number of misdirected calls intended for
La Leche League, a maternal support group named for the Spanish word for 'milk'.
Nobody knew otherwise, so that being the case, it still begs the question.
What does Lelache actually mean?
Root word: Lacher. Verb.
To drop release or let go. Leave behind. Fail.
Le lacheur. Noun.
Turncoat. An unreliable person. A quitter.
As an adjective, the latter part of my name, 'lache'
means loose or slack, like rope or a fabric.
All together though, the noun, le lache, has one fairly conclusive meaning.
[Text] Coward.
Who in my lineage was so spineless, so untrustworthy that society left them with
this burden to pass on?
It's weird that nobody else knew about this before.
For the past twenty-one years, I've known just eight other Lelaches,
all blood relation, and not one of them had ever made mention of any of these meanings.
As I looked at who I knew in this family, I realized just how small my scope was.
My family tree, as you can see, would barely pass as a sapling,
going as far as a few second cousins and grandparents.
If I was going to start looking into this, I had to open my mind, expand my horizons.
There had to be more family than this.
As it turns out, there is.
My great aunt Flora, my grandfather Henry's older sister.
She was the first person my parents pointed me to when I started
expressing an interest in my family history.
I knew her a bit from when I was younger, but I hadn't seen her in years
since my grandparents moved out of state.
We connected on Facebook through my mother, and after a bit of back and forth,
arranged to meet.
She asked that I leave my camera off during our conversation
and though I didn't capture the interview, I left with a much better understanding of her family,
including my grandfather and great grandfather.
Both her and my grandfather had grown up in Somerdale, New Jersey,
just a stone's throw away from my hometown of Stratford.
My grandfather Henry, I found out, was actually Henry Jr,
son of Arabella and, obviously, Henry Sr.
He was a scrawny boy, not unlike myself at a very young age.
Unlike me though, he was a natural born athlete.
His favorite sport was baseball
the one sport in particular that he excelled in.
My father once told me that it took him until he was well into his twenties
before he was any real competition for his father,
who by that time was well into his forties or fifties.
For a while, his family thought he might grow up and play professionally.
He was a fast boy, but with his early teens came a case of what
doctors thought was Polio, severely weakening the muscles in his legs.
Any aspirations of his becoming a sports star, it seemed, had vanished just that quickly.
His father, my great grandfather Henry Sr., had his hopes for a career dashed on account
of his health as well.
He was fiercely patriotic, and had proudly stepped forward to join the armed forces during World War 2.
However, he was denied on account of his weak heart, deemed unfit for the field of battle,
and instead, was placed as an air raid warden at home for the course of the war.
Two men fighting for their dreams who had them trampled right before their very eyes.
Two men who had quit.
Failed.
But that really wasn't the case for either of them.
At the least, it wasn't the end of their stories.
My grandfather went on to hold a number of jobs,
in the Navy, managing a hotel, owning his own gas station.
His father was just the same.
They were renaissance men, jacks of all trades,
providing for their families in whatever ways they could.
It seems to be a bit of a genetic trait amongst the men of my family.
Both my father and I fit that bill to some degree as well,
my father with accounting, automobiles, and sports,
myself with film, computer science, and writing.
By no means an expert in any of those fields,
but good enough to make a living out of it,
to get some joy out of it.
My favorite of these traits was something both of the Henries shared:
a love of music.
My great grandmother would sing while Henry Sr. played violin, mandolin, or banjo,
his children lending their voices or piano accompaniment to the mix.
As my aunt Flora told me this, I realized that this was something I had never known
about my family.
Until my brother started pursuing music seriously in middle school and high school,
I never even knew anybody in our family had any substantial musical talent.
Leaving my aunt Flora's, stories and photos in hand,
I realized how little I knew about my family.
With such an uncommon name and knowing nobody out- side the nine in my immediate family who carried it,
I never thought much about where else the Lelache name might exist in the world,
and where I might learn more about the family who owned it.
It's funny how a simple Google search can change all of that.
According to the White Pages website,
there are eleven people with the last name Lelache living in the United States.
Their map places three Lelaches in Florida,
but only two, my grandfather and grandmother, actually live there.
It also claims only two live in the state of Virginia, when in fact there are three.
Then there's the hub, the homeland for American Lelaches, New Jersey.
According to this map, six Lelaches live here, but they do not appear to count
either myself or my brother.
They do, however, count one Lelache who I've since found is deceased, and double count another who is living,
which, it would appear, brings us back to the original count.
Not bad, WhitePages.
A bit off, but you managed to do well consid- ering how few of us there are to keep track of.
At the very least, you've been doing better than I.
A few of those Lelaches they found in New Jersey were people I never even knew about.
Who was this family I'd never met?
How were they related?
Did they know the meaning of our shared name, or any stories of our shared family past?
There was still so much left to uncover.
My aunt Flora had given me a number of family records for the Lelaches that had
a number of names of my ancestors, but very little information about them.
The one that stuck out to me the most was the farthest back I could trace
my own lineage, Henry Sr.'s parents, Emile and Emily Lelache,
two French immigrants who had settled in New Jersey back in the early 1900s.
The problem was, she knew very little about them.
Her father, who wasn't entirely fond of the man, never spoke of him.
He was an enigma, an apparent dark spot on our family history
that nobody really remembered or maybe just didn't want to remember.
She mentioned that there was a relative of hers who lived in Atco, New Jersey,
the one who had first shared much of the family history and documentation with her years ago.
Was she part of this family that WhitePages had found for me?
I was admittedly frightened at the idea of reaching out to family who
very well could want nothing to do with our side of the family, or with me.
But I knew that I couldn't stop this journey just yet.
I had to give it a shot.
So I called: two different numbers, both ending in voice mails.
Trying my best to hide the nervousness in my voice, I told them who I was, why I was calling,
asking if any Lelaches still lived there, or if not, where they might be.
I waited, wondering if I'd reached anybody, or if this was the end of this story.
[Voice] You have one unheard message.
Not yet.
A week or so after I got that return voicemail,
I was on my way to Atco, New Jersey to a little road called Lelache Avenue.
I was going to meet the woman who, years ago, had shared stories with my great aunt Flora,
an oral history of a family that so many of us knew so little about.
I was going to meet Chickie Lelache.
I spent nearly six hours with her that first day.
In spite of her age, the woman has an energy about her that's infectious.
Before I got out my first question she was off,
telling stories of her husband, his father, and
most notably for me, the enigma, my great great grandfather Emile.
Chickie: Well when they first came, Emile- Ryan: Yeah
Chickie: and Emily, they came over from Marseilles.
And they came into New York,
and one was a valet, and the other one was a chambermaid.
And they even had to cut up their furniture because, to get heat, it was so bad then.
So they came down to Waterford, and he saved pennies in a cigar box
until he got enough money to take to this Gus Debone, and buy the property.
He used to grow violets. He had a place up at the Reading Terminal Market.
He was a businessperson, I mean, and he bought property by the lake,
and he had Bob's father build him the Whiteway Inn.
And the French club used to have all their meetings down there.
He was one of the people in the bank-
All the banks went up, they closed the doors, they all promised $20,000 for twenty years,
and they opened the banks, it was the only bank that didn't go up.
Ryan: Wow. Chickie: Atco.
Ryan: So many great stories, but for me nothing was adding up.
This man, this mystery, seemed to be a source of discomfort, anger, and fear.
His own son wouldn't speak of him to his children.
That's not a man who grows flowers, builds hotels, and saves the town's banking system.
What was it about this man that made much of his history disappear from the rest of the family?
As Chickie went on, explaining to me where Lelache Avenue got its name,
I started to get more of an answer.
Chickie: So, uh, the electric company, when they put the electric in, they named it Lelache Avenue.
But like I say, I was glad because he was a forefather of the town,
and he did, you know, help keep the bank open, so I figured it was good
to have something in his name.
even though he was a
Even though he was a, uh... what do you call it... an ogre. Ryan: [Laughs]
Chickie: But everybody was afraid of him.
When they sat at the table, he got the best meat, and all the rest of the people got.
Ryan: Whatever was left. Chickie: Right.
And then at Christmas time, he would give them all a piece of fruit. That was what they got.
Ryan: That was what they got for Christmas? Chickie: Yeah.
He was very very stingy that way, yeah.
Ryan: Emile the ogre.
The first truly negative stories I'd heard in my search back into my family.
So much of what I'd learned seemed to ignore or discount the literal meaning of our name.
Men and women who faced fears, defeat, and hardship.
Now finally I'd come face to face with parts of my family's past
that didn't seem to stray far away from those words.
But what does this mean?
After all this, what had I learned?
Just a month or so prior, I was convinced I'd gotten as much as anyone in my family had to offer.
Since then, the stories, pictures, films, memories have flooded in,
completely changing everything I thought I knew about my family.
That little sapling of a family tree now reaches back four generations,
and spans the globe, connecting me to family in the United States and France.
Some are still Lelaches by name, others only through genetics,
but every one of them is, at their core, a Lelache.
What does all of this really mean for this little family with a very strange last name?
This family who has collectively, if unknowingly,
defied these meanings given to them by their inherited name in so many ways.
I'd argue that, from what I've gathered so far,
they've given this name an entirely different meaning.
Lelache. Noun.
Athlete.
Patriot.
Family man.
Weakling? Failure?
No.
One who takes failure and rises from it.
Ogre. Brute.
Builder:
of homes, businesses, communities.
Of memories.
Collector. Hoarder.
Keeper of history.
Preserver of history.
One who is curious, questioning, searching.
That's Lelache. A name I'm proud of.
A name worth remembering.