Some thoughts on genealogy (Denny)...

A number of years ago, I renewed my interest in genealogy. What sparked that interest was discovering my grandmother's bible in which she had written the names of her ancestors stretching back to the time when they lived in New York. Some of those people had lived through the Revolutionary War. Only a very little research led to a whole "fan" of relatives reaching back into the early days of this country--in two cases, reaching right back to the May Flower. It was great fun--something akin to being a detective confronted with an ever expanding mystery, lots and lots of clues, and, if persistent, solutions.

My mother re-married after my father was killed in World War II. That meant that, unlike my childhood friends, I had three sets of grandparents. And because my step-father had been my father's first cousin, this meant that I had five grandparents, rather than the normal four, to trace.

T. S. Eliot noted that "What we know of other people/ Is only our memory of the moments/ During which we knew them" (from the Cocktail Party). When I was a child, I had a sense of being a member of a rather large set of people, the family, and that among these people there was a feeling of natural camaraderie, ease, and good humor. Unlike the strangers who came into my life, I experienced relatives (even the ones I had never met) as diverse, sometimes quirky, but basically good people who knew who I was (without me having to explain the multiple relational paths I had to most of them) and who accepted me into their circle with nary a question. However, I never met any of my relatives as strangers--that is, unlike meeting the father of my friend who was an adult and a person I had never met before, meeting relatives for the first time did not entail any shyness or uncertainty or even any period of "getting to know" one another. The reason was because I was a child. Had I been unable to meet my relatives until I had become an adult, my reaction to them would have been much different. Whereas the distant strictness of my step-grandfather would have been off-putting as an adult, as a child I simply accepted him as still another mysterious manifestation of that set of people called relatives.

My mother's father died when I was quite young. I do not have a great number of memories of him, nor did I as a child spend a lot of time in his company. I remember him laughing a lot (he was a great practical joker), being gone a lot (he and my grandmother traveled the country extensively hauling their trailer behind them), and being "an old man." My mother once sent me uptown with a message for him. I found him in the "card room" on the south side of the square. It was a smoky place with a wooden floor and a number of tables with "old men playing at cards with a twinkling of ancient hands" (Yeats). Whatever the message was, he laughed out loud, made a comment to his card partners (who also laughed) and told me to pick up a candy bar on my way out (which he would pay for).

My step-father's father was a stern and a strict man who loved to sit in his easy chair (I dared not sit in it when he was around) with his family arrayed before him and telling stories. My aunts and uncles would good-humoredly prod him into telling the same stories over and over which, at each telling, became more and more detailed and complex. And at Christmas, there was always the "extra" party (without grandpa) where the aunts and uncles would have a drink and would give each other bottles of whiskey as presents.

But the grandfather I knew best was my father's father. Perhaps because he had been killed in the war, my grandfather was especially attentive to me and allowed me to spend hours and hours with him, tagging after him while he did the chores out on the farm, teaching me to collect the eggs from the hens that pecked painfully at my hands, protecting me against an old sow with a 2 x 4 as we walked across the lot, giving me a tin cup of water from the tank below the wind mill, showing me the hay mow where I could go to play if I wanted, and letting me fire that old two-barreled shotgun that had been his father's.

Herwig Arts, a Jesuit theologian, once said language is an "attempt to encapsulate the 'not yet' of the future and the 'no more' of the past" (Faith and Unbelief, p. 120). And perhaps that is what genealogy is: an attempt to capture the "no more", especially when confronted with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the "not yet." However, it must always be tempered with the realization that the memories I have were those that I made when a child and when living in a safe environment with a group of people who I knew (by instinct) were integrally a part of me and I a part of them. As Eliot says (to continue the quotation from above), "And they have changed since then./ To pretend that they and we are the same/ Is a useful and convenient social convention/ Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember/ That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Genealogy is like that. The further back into history we go, the less we know of people. True, we have "the facts" like birth dates, marriage dates, death dates, dates of children's births. But we do not have the intimate connection with those strangers in the dusk that we did with the family we knew. And so genealogy is a two-tiered process. The first is that of historian--the dates and events that one can find documented in the record. The second is that of family member--the memories of real people at times in my life, or the stories of other family members of times in their lives. Is it any surprise to find that the latter is always of more interest than the former?