I've been knocking around ancestry.com lately seeing how much of my family tree I can complete with their service. It's been fascinating. They have access to the actual scanned census forms from the early 1900's and literally billions of searchable documents. I've managed to trace most of the family lines back to the 1700's. It turns out the Hill side of the family were mainly farmers in North Carolina, and my mom's side were mainly farmers in Virginia. Good stock if you ask me.
My imagination has been running wild reading between the lines of all these past kin. I found a census from 1900 recording my mom's great-grandparents Joseph and Katherine Perry. It listed them living in Buchanan County, Virginia with a handful of kids - Grover, Willie, Valerina, Fred, and Robert. The occupation field on the document for Joe shows "Logger" written in calligraphy. I imagined him sitting at the table one evening filling out the census form or perhaps talking to the census worker. He hollered out to Katherine for the ages of the kids who happen to be making a racket outside or running the coon dogs or getting into whatever trouble kids managed to get into at the turn of the century. Norman Rockwell sat in the corner painting his next Saturday Evening Post cover.
Then comes the United States Census of 1910. A decade has passed and with it, Joe the logger has too. Filling out this census was a different scene. Same house. Same table. Katherine fills out the form this year. I imagine a logging accident took Joe from Katherine. He would have been in his early 40's. She listed herself as "Head of Household" and her occupation as "Farmer". Valerina married a man twice her age, and moved in with her mother, no doubt helping out on the farm. The events of that decade shaped their entire universe. It turned that little farmhouse upside down and brought the sorrow and pain that changed everyone of them for the rest of their lives. But all of that is at best a barely audible echo now. I'm sure it affected their history - my history, but it's impossible to see. All those hard days and tears in Katherine's pillow have been rendered down to a census form and stone in a field somewhere.
It's comforting in an odd way. For one, our struggles and character will affect the future family in little ways. Katherine's fortitude surely impacted her children. They carried it with them on into a century of huge change. Perhaps they carried it on to me. Perhaps I'll pass it on to Leon, and he'll do the same.
But at the same time, our lives will be rendered away to records and forgotten blogs. Those nearest me at my death will carry the best parts of me along with them. I'll be as real to them as when I was drawing the same breath they were. But for my grandkids, I'll be the old timer. They'll only know me for my stories of who I was. In turn, their children will regard me as more legend than anything else. I'll be lucky to have even met them. The next generation will know me as the kin who saw the new millennium born. As the generations pass, I become just a set of dates to the living. After death, it sure doesn't take long for your name to disappear as much as you have. Artist, Banksy said, "They say you die twice - once when you stop breathing and then a second time, when someone mentions your name for the last time."
I hope I leave something worth talking about.
