Sophia's Search

Standing on tiptoe at her mother’s bedside, little Sophia heard these words:

"I've always loved you as if you were my own."

Sophia did not know what to think.

Her mother closed her eyes and spoke no more.

Thus began the mystery of our grandmother Sophia's origins.

Raised in a Czech household in Salem, Oregon, near the start of the Great War in Europe, she was the youngest of four girls, more than ten years younger than the other sisters.

She had always felt different.

A lingering feeling haunted her that, somehow, she didn’t belong.

Her mother's last words confirmed those feelings.

She asked her father what it all meant:

“So, who was my mother? Where did I come from?”

Papa, in old-world fashion, kept quiet.

Some things were never spoken of.

That’s just the way it was.

Sophia asked everyone she could.

An older boy, a cousin, one day told her:

“You really need to know. There was a terrible accident with horses and a wagon. Only the baby survived.”

“I must have been that baby,” my grandmother told me.

“So, we really don’t know who your parents were, right, Grandma?” my 13-year-old self asked. "Maybe you were someone very special, like Princess Anastasia? Maybe you were rescued from Russia and hidden away in America?”

“Maybe,” said Grandma.

She paused a bit.

“I like to think I was Cherokee.”

That made sense to me. Her love of the land. Her deep dark eyes, her high cheekbones. Her dignified, quiet demeanor. It was as if she had a secret connection with the Great Spirit.

It was easy to imagine how she stole the heart of a much older man, Andrew Harry Hilton, a World War I veteran who married her when she turned 21 and he 40.

He, too, did not speak much of the past.

They had a daughter one year later, who would one day be my mother.

He died just a few short years after his daughter was born.

Lingering lung troubles from German mustard gas in the trenches of France, they said.

"That night was the only time I ever saw my mother cry," my mother once told me.

Sophia was not yet 30, now a widow and a single mom.

Where does one get the strength to go on?

You see her here, pictured above, in her nurse’s uniform, which she sewed herself. Handy with a needle, she made most of the clothes for the household.

She opened a family rest home and took in the elderly and the terminally ill. She worked hard to make a safe and secure future for her daughter and herself.

Some years later, she met a nice fellow named Antone at a town dance, handsome in his uniform, ready to be deployed to another great war in Europe. Before he left, he said:

“I like you so much I think I’d like to ask you to marry me.”

“Well, why don’t you then?” she said to him.

She was, he was to learn, fiercely independent. If they were to marry, they would keep separate bank accounts. The money she earned she spent as she liked. But most of it she saved. You never know what might happen tomorrow.

They made a life together for more than 40 years.

Their example of hard work, frugality, and generosity stays with me to this day.

By the time I knew her, she was my Grandma, and besides the gift of her quiet and kind presence, she often brought us one special gift.

Peaches.

Yes, fresh peaches. Bushels of them when they were in season.

And homemade canned peaches when the harvest was plentiful. She knew all about canning. As a teenager, she worked in the cannery in Salem. Hard, heavy, hot work, but good work, she said.

A hard worker all her life, she passed away without knowing who her parents were.

Today, we continue her search. We found records showing the birth of Sophia Lillian Yilek in Minnesota in 1912. Yes, it might be her.

But what of the story of the wagon and horses? Could the accident have happened on the Oregon Trail as settlers moved west?

We strive to piece together our history. Small hints. Few facts. Many questions.

We tell stories, trying to understand it all.

But most of all, we tell stories to remember the people we loved.

*

*

In memory of Sophia Lillian Yilek Hilton Wenda

Possibly born in Minnesota in 1912.

Laid to rest in 1990 in Ventura, California.

Rest in Peace