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Biographical Sketch of
Jeanette Simpson
 It
was 1:15 a.m. when I made my appearance in this world during the summer of
1947. My mother had previously had a stillborn child so my birth had been
anxiously awaited. I was the first grandchild for my mother’s parents,
the first female grandchild for my father’s parents. Recently a woman
from my church told me that, my parents being just a year or two older
than the others in their Sunday School class, I was the first baby
belonging to anyone in that class so they all spoiled me. My mother says I
smiled all the time, even woke up smiling, but who wouldn’t if they had
that much love surrounding them?
I was named for Jeanette MacDonald, singer
and actress, who was often paired with Nelson Eddy in the movies. My
mother loved both of them.
We first lived in town in a large two-story
house. When I began to walk around and get into things, my father decided
he needed to build a fence around the backyard. The fence was complete and
he was attaching the gate when he turned around and saw me straddling the
top of the fence. I had climbed up and over so I could go explore the
world! We moved to the country!
 I
later had two brothers and there were only boys in the other houses on our
little country road so I played sports. I was a real tomboy, however, my
paternal grandmother had made sure I learned female skills beginning with
learning to do embroidery work at the age of five. She told me when she
was young, growing up in the Scottish community in Greene County, Indiana,
that a year after a woman she knew had married, someone asked her husband
how things were going. He said fine except she didn’t know how to do
anything. That was such a disgrace to her family. Grandma didn’t want me
to be a disgrace, so she started me on needlework and later taught me to
bake and make quilts. My maternal grandmother made sure I knew how to make
jams and jellies, and gave me an appreciation of decorating skills. She
also taught me to drink tea. At Thanksgiving the year I was fourteen, my
mother and her mother went to Texas to visit my uncle and his family. I
cooked my first Thanksgiving meal that year with my other grandmother
hoving but with my father telling her to stay out of the kitchen and let
me do it. It turned out great!
My father’s family was very close. He had
three brothers, no sisters, but my grandfather had three sisters who were
married and each had one child. I remember being around my
great-grandmother and my great aunts and uncles and distant cousins a
great deal. We used to go to the woods in the spring as an extended
family, taking our lunch with us for a picnic on the edge of a field. The
men would then go morel mushroom hunting while the women talked and
great-grandma, with her big apron pulled up to hold her treasures,
searched for dock and dandelion greens. My other great-grandmother died
when I was very young, but I remember her lying in a bed in Grandma and
Grandpa’s dining room. Several years later, we all made a trip down to
Greene County, Indiana, to the Carmichael cemetery where she was buried so
we could set a stone on the grave.
 Grandma
and Grandpa grew watermelons and strawberries. Grandma would pay me 10
cents a quart to pick strawberries then she sold them at a table along the
road for 25 cents a quart. I ate as many as I picked, warm and with sand
on them! So good! The whole family gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s for
Memorial Day at the end of May when the strawberries were ripe. In the
fall, Grandma baked apple pies from the apples on their trees, and Grandpa
made cider in an old wooden cider press. They were very basic country
people. Grandpa worked in the coal mine.
My maternal grandparents grew tomatoes
which they sold along the road. Those were good too just off the vine and
warm. They had a large garden and raised chickens; they had blackberries
and raspberries and cherries too. They had oriental carpets, lovely china,
and books. Grandma loved hollyhocks and taught me to make dolls from them
using the buds as heads on the flower stems, so the dancing girls had many
different colors of ball-gowns. Grandpa had graduated from engineering
school and taught electrical shop at a local high school. He had a shop
outside the house. My great aunt, Grandpa’s sister, lived with them. She
also was a school teacher.
 My
father was a purchasing agent for the coal mines in the area, first the
Saxon mine which was a shaft mine, then the Viking mine which was a slope
mine. Sometimes on Saturday morning he would take me to the mine and let
me paint the various sized bits different colors, some red and some
yellow. He had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II in Hawaii, San
Francisco, the Philippines, then in Boston. He was a loving man, very
conscientious and honest, smiled all the time. He was active at our church
serving as an elder, and he often took me with him when he called on the
shut-ins and hospital patients.
 My
mother had graduated from college and had taught school before my birth.
Her favorite subjects were math, English and music. She was qualified to
teach all three but math was her favorite. She played the piano and worked
in the nursery at church, worked with the junior church, and she and Dad
were youth group sponsors. Whenever the doors were open, we were at
church. I was surrounded by love and support from every angle.
Mom has always enjoyed reading and she read
to my brothers and I a great deal and made sure we had books. We used to
laugh because she would have us lie down on the bed for a nap and then
read to us so we would go to sleep. She was the one who went to sleep
while we giggled. But, she instilled in me a love of reading. Her mother
also read a great deal, National Geographic being her favorite thing to
read. She dreamed of visiting other places and passed that dream on to me.
I was a good student when I went to school
always ranking near the top of the class. My favorite subjects were
English and history. My dreams were about visiting Britain. I was
determined that I would someday do so. We often went to the library where
I read every book they had about traveling in Britain. I was sixteen
before I discovered the joys of being a girl and began to be clothes and
makeup conscious! After graduating from high school, I went to Indiana
State University where I majored in Social Work. I thought I was going to
change the world, but my heart wasn’t in my schooling at this time. I
worked for a department store during my University days and modeled some
of the clothes, being the first to wear a mini dress in Terre Haute,
Indiana. Of course, they were only a few inches above the knees when they
first came in style, not the micro minis that later appeared! I ended up
leaving school to get married, never a smart thing to do, and later
regretted that decision.
 I
was married at age twenty-one. A year later my husband and I moved to
London, Ontario, Canada where he worked on the Canadian National Railway.
A year after that our son was born then a year later we had a daughter.
This completed our family. I made sure my children had books and were
exposed to museums and art galleries from the time they could get anything
at all from the experience. The first time I took them to an art gallery,
I took them into the shop and told them to pick out a print for their
rooms. My son chose a Picasso and my daughter chose a Rembrandt. They were
ages five and four; their tastes still run along these lines to this day.
We went to children’s theatre productions, to theatre in the park, to
Toronto on the train for special exhibits of Mayan and Aztec art and for
the King Tut exhibit which toured North America. We made excursions to a
rebuilt Indian village, to a sugar camp to see maple syrup being made, to
a pioneer village, to Ailsa Craig where there was a place you could find
fossils, to Stratford for the Shakespeare Festival, and to the library
where I found so many more books about Britain! We took a trip up to the
Georgian Bay and took a ferry across then went into a copper mine. We went
to Niagara Falls every spring when the gardens were so beautiful. We went
to see the Queen and Prince Philip when they visited London. While in
Canada, I attended my first Scottish games and went to the Military Tattoo
at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. I loved the British flavor of Canada,
and I met so many new emigrants from Scotland and England.
In 1981, we left Canada to return to the
U.S. There was a great deal of stress in our
family. We settled in Oklahoma then moved to Missouri for a little over a
year then back to Oklahoma. We took a three-month trip all around the
United States seeing many places we had always wanted to see, but there
was no keeping this family together. My husband eventually left me with
the two children to raise. They were then ages fourteen and fifteen. I
hadn’t worked outside the home since my marriage seventeen years
previously, but I managed to get the first job for which I applied,
librarian for the newspaper in Norman, Oklahoma. In this position, I
clipped and filed stories, typed in recipes for our recipe section that
came out just before Christmas every year, and wrote the obituaries. My
love for sports was soon noticed and before I knew it I was helping the
sports department with box scores and working on football recruiting
stories surrounding the University of Oklahoma.
 When
my children were about to enter the University, I knew I couldn’t get
them through school on what I was earning at the newspaper. I often
wondered how I would manage when one day I got a surprise phone call. It
was from a development officer at the University. She said she had heard
about me and wanted to know if I would come to work at the University as
they needed me there. The job paid twice the money I was making. I told
her I would think about it knowing I couldn’t afford not to take the
job. I went there as an entry level secretary. In three months I was
promoted to secretary to the director of development, and in another year
I was promoted to office manager. My children graduated from the
University; my daughter got married; and I thought I was ready to relax a
bit and live my own life. I still had my dream of traveling to Britain to
fulfill.
However, my parents had moved to Oklahoma
when my father found out he was ill with a liver disease that was
incurable. He knew they would need my help later. My vacation times were
spent taking them to Branson or back to Indiana to visit family and
friends. Dad’s liver disease stayed about the same, but he soon found
out he had inoperable prostate cancer. Before long I was spending every
evening at my parents’ home fixing meals, cleaning, and keeping them
company. My mother’s health wasn’t good at all, we even suspected she
had Alzheimer’s disease at that time. My lunch hours were spent running
to the pharmacy for prescriptions for Dad or doing their grocery shopping.
I only slept at my home. Then I began to have to take time off to take Dad
for radiation treatments and doctor’s appointments. Sometimes he wanted
to talk until 11 p.m. then I would go home and fall into bed then get up
and go to work the next day. I will never regret the time I spent talking
to him or taking care of things for my parents. I learned so much during
that time, but it was hard.
When my father died I immediately had to
give up my rental home and move in to take care of my mother. She was
comfortable in her home with all of her familiar things around. I
continued to work for a while then she began having serious health
problems, breaking first a hip then a shoulder and doing things that made
no sense. We found out she didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but she was having
seizures. Eventually I left my job to care for her full time and have been
doing that now for seven years.
However, in 1996 I was able to make a trip
to Britain, taking a tour that took me to London then around England, into
Wales, and through southern Scotland just to Glasgow and Edinburgh with a
stop at Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford. My son went along and we took a
boat ride on the Thames one night arriving at Big Ben just in time to hear
him count out nine o’clock. We visited Stonehenge and Stratford, rode a
boat across a canal in north Wales, went through the Lake District, toured
Belvoir Castle, and Cambridge and back to London where we saw "Sunset
Boulevard" starring Petula Clark. It was wonderful! In 1997, my
cousin and I spent a week in just London visiting all the sites there.
That year my other cousin had done a lot of
family research and had traced our family back to Scotland. Duncan
Carmichael came to America in 1763 along with his wife and children. They
settled in Virginia and North Carolina having a farm that straddled the
two states. Duncan’s sons served in the Revolutionary War on the
American side and were awarded land in an area of their choosing. They
didn’t take the land but some of their children claimed it and came by
wagon train to Greene and Monroe Counties in Indiana to settle in 1829.
There is a Carmichael cemetery there where my ancestors are buried back to
the first generation to be born in America.
Hoagy Carmichael, the actor and songwriter,
comes from this same line.
 This
discovery led my cousin and I to join Clan Carmichael and get active in
the clan. My cousin is now the membership chairperson and I am the book
editor and corresponding secretary. I have worked on a cookbook for the
Clan and also a history/memory album which was presented to our Chief.
Between us we have attended games at Stone Mountain, Georgia, Glasgow,
Kentucky, Springfield, Illinois, Columbus, Indiana, Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, and Long Beach, California. Last year our Chief Richard
Carmichael of Carmichael held a Millennium Gathering on the Carmichael
estate in Lanarkshire, Scotland. We knew we wanted to go but we also
wanted to see more of Scotland. We chose to go two weeks early to take a
tour all around the country (you can read about this tour under the travel
section at Electric Scotland) then to go to the Gathering (a write up
about this can be found under Clan Carmichael on the clan pages at
Electric Scotland). My dream had come true!
I wrote these articles for Alastair and
Electric Scotland then later, remember I am a reader, I discovered an old
copy of Sir Walter Scott’s "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border"
on the Barnes and Noble out-of-print site, my favorite place for books. I
asked Alastair if he would like to have some of the ballads for the site.
He said he would; so I began typing them into the computer. When I
finished those, I offered to help him with other things. He then put me on
staff and since then I have been reading and enjoying the various things I
have been typing for the site. I have also contributed other articles and
poems, a gift ideas section and some crafts and cooking items for the kids’
pages.
This past summer my mother and I moved back
to Indiana near family and old friends. Both of my children have settled
in Illinois so I am now close to them and my two grand-daughters. We have
so many activities here that I have had to begin keeping an appointment
book! If I should ever get bored, I have numerous hobbies to keep me busy
– sewing, needlepoint, embroidery, counted cross stitch, quilting,
furniture refinishing, home decorating, various crafts, reading, family
history, photography, and giving teas, to name a few.
These are a few of my favorite things: a
sunrise; the freshness of birdsong in the early morning; deep blue morning
glories; roses; lilacs; peonies; lily-of-the-valley; sweet peas; violets;
hydrangeas; wisteria; old quilts; cups of tea; beautiful teapots and cups
and saucers; Christmas; other holidays; chocolate chip cookies; travel;
sports (especially baseball); old family pictures and letters; soft music;
Mozart; James Galway music; pipe bands; going to the theatre in London; my
son, daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters; books; dew shimmering in
the sun; blue and white china; watching the birds at the feeder and
birdbath; redbud and dogwood trees; cooking and baking; teddy bears; the
color blue; the Carmichael tartan (just my colors); bubble baths by
candlelight; covered bridges; golden oak furniture; walking along a quiet
beach in the moonlight with only the sound of the waves; cherubs; stained
glass; Victorian lace and décor; cobalt blue glass; walks in the rain;
the smell of rain; an isolated cabin in the woods with the sounds and
scenes of nature all around; curling up in front of a fireplace; the
sounds and smells and colors of spring; the sounds (crunching leaves) and
smells (burning leaves) and colors of autumn; watching snow fall and line
the branches; sunlight sparkling on ice covered branches; old Cary Grant
movies; romantic poetry; Sir Galahad; ladybugs; museums; art galleries;
the spiritual quality of old abbeys; porches with swings; butterflies;
hummingbirds; bees; scented sheets; sunsets; silk; good friends; a loving
and caring family; Canadian geese flying over honking loudly; letters and
e-mails from friends; Scottish history; the Highlands; "Murder, She
Wrote," David Suchet as Poirot; John Thaw as Morse; Jane Austen
novels; and life in general.
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