How I Came to Genealogy and Other Sensitive Practices

This week, I learned that my most aged relative, ninety-eight years old, had her house “cleaned out” by her stepson. When I learned the news, my body went numb while my mind searched for answers to the question of how this man whom I had referred to as cousin out of respect could have no regard for his stepmother’s blood relatives, our bond, and our memories, to say nothing of Cousin herself, his stepmother.

My elder, now in assisted living and suffering moderate dementia, is my grandmother’s niece, the only child of her younger sister, Aunt E. My dear elder, the last of her generation, is my father’s first cousin. She had no children of her own, a regret she has shared, but, up until the last two years, Cousin lived well, she and her husband, in a neat Chicago neighborhood, in a well-kept, nicely-furnished bungalow. It had been her home since 1955.

Having no biological offspring, this first cousin, one generation removed, acquired many beautiful things in life; she was married 65 years before her husband’s passing at age 96. And it was only after his passing that she began giving her several middle-aged cousins some of her things. My siblings and I patiently awaited the family heirlooms both because we have accumulated in our own lives a good deal of stuff and, for me, because of an indelible memory of Cousin discretely passing me a twenty dollar bill under a table where I sat with her and her husband, both finely dressed in tailored suits. It was an early, unforgettable lesson about marriage, for a 20-year-old college student.

Cousin and Husband (left) in a Chicago nightclub in the 1940s, with friends.

Cousin had come that day from the city to the Heights to see me while I spent Spring Break with my father’s oldest sister, older than Cousin by five years. The two had a lot in common but were different as well, Cousin enjoying the life of a Chicago socialite while Aunt M sometime in the ’70s left her south side apartment for a borderland. Though Aunt M didn’t appear to regret the move, she did lament leaving secretarial work. As much as she enjoyed gardening her ample Sunnyville lot and decorating the small postwar ranch she shared with my uncle, neither was the salve she needed to heal undisclosed wounds of the past — life before Chicago and long before my birth. For that, she used a slow drag from Pall Mall cigarettes, a coffee cup of java and whiskey, Danielle Steele novels, and enshrinement of a collection of yards of beautiful fabric. Though I didn’t know how to sew back then, I nevertheless asked her on a different visit if I could have some of the fabric. She managed to give me one lot, begrudgingly I felt at the time.

I’m not sure why I wanted the fabric, or why I desired also a cheap metal belt that Aunt M had probably worn when she was in her 20s. She allowed me that as well, and I kept it for years though I never wore it, finding nothing to wear it with. I would glance it every now and again, and my glimpse of the links between its oval, embossed medallions helped me make connections. Material things have power not only to construct time; they are a mental and sensual portal to the past.

A satin quilt made by my grandmother. For years, it was in the attic of Cousin’s home. After the passing of her husband, I traveled to Chicago with my sisters to receive four quilts. I’ve named this one Daisy’s Quilt of Many Colors.

I’ve written before about this kind of engagement of the past, both a stoking of memory and an imbibing of sights and odors of times gone by. Aunt M’s collection of fabric was small-scale hoarding, something which, admittedly, I too practice, and, given more space that she enjoyed, I have multiplied. I’m reminded of August Wilson’s character Troy Maxson, who drinks only on the weekend and even then only so much. I collect somewhat obsessively, but I also purge regularly.

Nevertheless, I am accused by my spouse of hoarding, a judgment that more than grates on my nerves. Every item I bring home places me in the era I prefer to live in — for a moment or for the rest of my life. Thrifting is rebellion, or at least it used to be.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I had lined up on my Formica-topped Steelcase-like office desk three dissimilar staplers, only one of which I may have used. A student, noticing them, remarked that I was “a history hoarder.” In the ten years since the observation was made, I have given much thought to its meaning and its truth. I not only collect things; I collect history and struggle to share it.

I recently read somewhere a cogent argument that Google’s generous gift of cloud storage has created something akin to hoarding of information. Certainly, every time I snap a photo with my Pixel the image goes to Photos, where I might look at it once a year as I scroll through my collection. Perhaps 1% of my photos has been shared — on Messenger, Instagram, or in one of my blogs. I don’t know if my usage is typical or not.

In this era, the same hoarding behavior I suspect belongs to people with Ancestry accounts. Though I pay the subscription fee monthly, I only use the family history service half as often, even as I have collected there many documents, family trees, etc. It’ll all be there when I need it, I have reasoned. Maybe my father’s youngest brother, who changed the locks on my grandparents’ home in Detroit at their passing in the early 80s thought the same.

Uncle S took over the house from his then still living mother before my grandfather was yet cold in his grave. Leaving his own nearby home, Uncle S packed into his parents’ house his furnishings. A 70s console stereo leaned awkwardly against the dining room table where my grandmother’s coffee service had been for so long proudly displayed. The out-of-place mid-century piece left only a narrow path for a 79-year-old widow to travel to a kitchen once easy to navigate.

At 15 years old I thought my uncle’s behavior strange. I didn’t understand it, but I couldn’t then have judged him for it. I’m not sure I allowed myself to become fully angry that he permitted none of us — siblings or grandchildren — access to the house. Occasionally, when the mood struck him, he would allow us to go through for fifteen minutes. In that window, I managed to retrieve a few photographs including several of Aunt M on a picnic blanket on Detroit’s Belle Isle and of the Boys in front of my grandparents’ first home in their adopted city.

Uncle S with unidentified friend. A few years ago, I captured some photos including this one from the photo album of Aunt E, Cousin’s mother. I have no knowledge of where the album is now.

The unfortunate truth is, we are not a family that inherits things. We are unable to let go of material representations of past, instead, creating from them mental memorials. To relieve my heart of its misery, I inquired of my step-cousin’s own niece how her step-uncle could sell everything in Cousin’s house without calling her blood relatives, how he could send our family photos to the landfill or to a thrift store without a thought to our feelings. “He doesn’t have his father’s last name,” was her response. “There are lots of wounds, lots of pain around that.”

Perhaps it is irony, or maybe it is my fate that I am also a collector of names.