Not Just Nuclear: Families are elders long buried and generations yet unborn

Not Just Nuclear: Families are elders long buried and generations yet unborn
plough.com

The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying, gathers into itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.

The suitcase's original owner, another aunt, "Aunt" Faye, had lived to be 103 years old but had never had children.

And so I got to work scanning I believe over 500 photos — the earliest a tin-type from 1890 or so. Many were then cleaned up in Photos — levels adjusted, scratches and imperfections "healed" digitally. In time I was able to scan more photos from the family and increase my collection. Likely over 1000 now.

Some photos had something written on either the front or back and I also dutifully added metadata to the digital photo describing the text written.

At this time too, I had begun doing some genealogy on Ancestry.com.

As I pored over the photos, trying to determine who was in the photo, where the photo was taken, I began to "know" the people — family dead even before I was born. I could recognize them then. It became easier to approximate the date of the photos too: looking for young relatives in the photos, guessing their apparent age, knowing when they were born from my genealogy.

Eventually they began to sort: first a young Gertrude standing awkwardly in the tin-type as a child, another studio photo and she's about to become a teen, then with her sisters as a young woman, married, with her own children, in her new dress, with her daughter and her daughter's husband, on vacation, with her grandchildren, white-haired with her daughter - now old herself. Finally her headstone.

Entire lives, captured in photographs. And interleaved with the children they gave birth to, who too grew old in photos and also died — and in one case leaving, as it were, a suitcase of these photos that would come to me.

The connectivity of family back past 100 years has never been made so real to me as it has through photos. Maybe I should have been able to see that continuity in the absence of family photos but there they are.

And as I get older I do consider more and more those not yet born. I suppose this digital legacy is one obvious example. I have been spreading the photos as far and wide as I can, not just to far flung relatives but also to Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave.com, etc. Surprisingly, I have already had relatives I did not know existed reach out to me having stumbled upon some of these photos on Ancestry and Find-A-Grave.

Family photo calendars I created for a few years were sent to two dozen relatives. I have a "family photo album" I am now assembling — I hope to have it done in a year or so and print a few dozen through Lulu.com or similar and send those out to as many relatives who want them as well.

It occurred to me that my parents would be dead one day and if it were to fall to me to tell the grandchildren the family origins I would be at a complete loss. I had relied on my "elders" to have that knowledge.

Ancestry and the like makes it easy to reconstruct your family tree even if you are starting with almost no knowledge. But there's the oral tradition of "your great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel from the gas lamp fixtures leaking" that would have been a lot harder to have found.

So I did find a sudden interest in genealogy. Or maybe it was a sense of duty or obligation — but that quickly did in fact turn into an interest.

Perhaps if you never do have children you might also never find an interest in genealogy.

I'll say this though, I have not fond any interest in finding genealogical connections to famous people. Nor have I had much interest in going back more than 150 years or so. I think the photos uniquely draw me into the lives of the generations captured in them. And perhaps because they are photos, not wills or marriage licenses, etc., I am come to feel either the futility and brevity of life or, at other times, the wonder and often humble dignity of it.