Monday, I edited Reel 4, the home movie that broke on me. I don’t think I really lost that much footage. I’ll know for certain when I get around to repairing it, but that’s very low on the priority list. I’ve got the tool to hold the film while I splice it, but USPS decided to take an extra three or four days to get the splice strips to me, so I’ll hold off on that.
I was thrilled to get the fifth one done. It had a couple of minutes of footage of Nan, my maternal grandmother. She was in her early 70s for that segment, pushing my stroller around the driveway in Sherman. I was just six or so months old. It warmed my heart to see that footage.
The Chosen
When I was going through the TNG Templates trying to choose just the right one, I started reflecting on why I put so much effort into genealogy research. Darrin had some placeholder text in the demo templates beyond the usual lorem ipsum stuff, a piece called “The Storyteller,” I think. It was possibly written in 1943, though there are various claims about authorship. But it explains very well in 400 words or so why I do what I do.
We are the chosen.
In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.
Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.
How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us. How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do.
The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today.
It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us.
It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them.
So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before.
The Chosen of My Generation
It’s something of a lonely existence. I know there are family members who get tired of me asking questions about distant relatives they’ve long forgotten about. They’ve had enough of my begging for photos, old family letters, and papers. They’re beyond hearing me say, “Guess what I found out about Uncle So-and-So?”
But I still do it.
I still try to learn more about cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. I want to know how I ended up arriving when I did. Why did JC Mueller buy a ticket to the US when he apparently had no family here?
I want to know how and when he met Louisa Schirmer.
Why did they leave New York for Texas?
I want to know where and who Andrew Baldinger came from. Why did he choose Galveston?
How did Louis Diefenbach end up leaving Wiesbaden and making his way to Columbus? I think his father Phillip may have already been there, but then why did Phillip end up there?
Noah Garrison was born in Jersey. What drove him to move to Ohio?
I know my Dad took a teaching position at Marietta College in 1967. But Sherman, Texas, was close to his home and family in Austin, as well as my mom’s family in New Orleans. What made Marietta and MC so much more attractive than Sherman and Austin College? Why would he move his family 1,100 miles away from home?
So many questions.
So many stories.
I’ve said several times over the years that that I’m fascinated by the human side of events, and the emotion behind the facts. Even if I can’t always convey that emotion in my characters, I crave learning about it so I can imagine the apprehension, the concern, the sense of adventure. I wrote a while back that jumping on a ship and sailing three thousand miles without knowing what you’re going to do when you get there took a level of courage I wasn’t sure I possessed.
Then Again
I’m writing this in Oklahoma. We settled here fifteen years ago after a journey that wasn’t dissimilar from what our forefathers took. We uprooted our family for what was going to be an open-ended road trip around the country. There was a general idea of where we were going to go, though we only visited a small fraction of those places. We had no real plan for earning income along the way, and the main reason we settled when we did was because we were running out of money.
(Several years ago, we were talking to someone about our RV trip, and when I mentioned that we’d settled in Muskogee, they asked, “Why? Did you run out of gas?”)
When you add up our travels, it’s close to 4,400 miles.
We didn’t have any specific plans to move from Ohio to Oklahoma. Diana and I thought it was best for our family at the time.
I’d guess it’s not unreasonable to think the same of our forefathers.
I’d still like to meet them.
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