The Stories Not Told

Working on my family tree, I am sometimes amazed by how many tantalizing gaps show up. That doesn't surprise me when working with far-distant lines, when records were scarce. But sometimes lacunae appear far closer to present day. For example, my father's mother's line is fairly clearly defined in census and Ancestry records back in the latter half of the 19th Century, from Clermont County Ohio to central Iowa. Things seem pretty clear, children popping up every few years, parents and grandparents passing on, and so on.

But even that relatively recent past can get a bit odd.

For example, there's a girl, Clara, born in 1880 and gone from the family census as of the 1885 state census. Child mortality was high back then, so that's not unusual of itself; my grandmother was born in 1884 or so, so she would not have known Clara and may not have ever heard about her. But it's interesting that a Clara Smith born the same date as the one in our family would have died in 1885 some 40 miles north of their hometown. Other data suggests it's the same Clara, but why would she have died that far away, at the age of 5? Forty miles was a major expedition back then, and there's no indication of family up there. A family trip gone bad? Not likely that story will ever be told now.

Then there's a tantalizing bit from my uncle's memoirs in which he mentions that his mother -- my maternal grandmother -- talked of an older, unnamed brother who died at the age of 8. All the brothers listed in her recollections lived to ripe ages, but I find one loosely-connected family tree that suggests a Charles was born in 1876 to my maternal grandmother's family, but Charles never appears in any family state or federal census report until the 1900 federal census, when he springs forth, full-grown as it were, in my grandmother's family, at the age of 23 (obviously not dead at 8), single and working as a livery driver. So where was he in all those other state and federal censuses? And even more interesting, a 5-year-old grand-daughter named Tassie appears in that federal census. It's tempting to guess and presume she is his daughter from a failed or widowed marriage, but no way of knowing. Especially because Charles and Tassie seem to disappear after that.

I look around me, at all the detitrus and debris of my life, and tend to presume that my existence, and that of my near and dear (and I suppose far and annoying) family will be an open book, and that any descendants trying to reconstruct days past will have a fairly easy time of it.

But that, I think, is pure hubris and vanity. They may be able to draw up a basic map, reasonably reliable, but there will always be gaps and guesses. Because nothing is clear forever.

And in the end only nothing is clear.