Finding One’s Place in the Universe

My mother (right) at her wedding reception, Endicott, NY (1941)

Lina breezed in through the front door, gushing with chatter. Her tall, well-coiffed Texas enthusiasm exploded all over our restrained front parlor in upstate New York.  Papers flew out of her briefcase and spread out over the coffee table, some escaping onto the floor. I sat quietly on the piano bench, looking on the scene with fascination – who could get a word in, after all?

It was the 1970s. Lina was researching the history of her family – our family, at least on my mother's side. We’d not met her before that afternoon. She confided that she was also in the midst of working toward her doctorate, although I never learned in what field. Lina filled our afternoon with delicious stories about spies for Washington’s army, stage coach runs, persecuted Huguenots, and miscellaneous family indiscretions.  I suspect that tracking down the long-dead Lusks and Mersereaus was the way she expended excess energy  -- I don’t believe that Lina could limit her focus to just one thing. Ever. 

Brother Harvey, Jan, and Grandmother (nee Lusk) with Buster (ca. 1930)

My mother had been compiling data on the family, too – that’s how she and Lina had discovered one another. My home town, it turns out, is a treasure trove of information on the Mersereau family. John and Joshua Mersereau were brothers whose Staten Island stage coach operation and tavern -- “The Blazing Star”– were seized by the British army when it captured New York City. They had turned over the horses they had saved to service of the Colonials and became spies for General Washington. After the war, John and Joshua both settled in the Town of Union, in which the Village of Endicott is located. Their descendents lived there and prospered for many generations, my family included, from the 1700s to the present day. 

Mom and Lina shared the data they had compiled independently. After some hours, an elegant luncheon of small sandwiches and several rounds poured from the silver coffee service, Lina gathered up her papers and shoved them back in her case. As she stood up to leave, she announced that she was going to Staten Island the following day to look for more historical evidence of the family. She promised that she would send it on to Mom when she had put it all in good form.

Family car trip to Canada (ca. 1927)

I lost track of the saga after that. I never could retain much of what Mom told me about my ancestors – a few images, maybe a few names. I was young. Life beckoned.

It is now 2012. I am the keeper of many of my family’s photos and records. My mother had carefully put them aside and ceremoniously delivered them to me as soon as I purchased my own house. The collection included a manila envelope that contained all of the research my mother compiled over a decade, as well as the data sheets Lina sent to her after the visit to Endicott. Lina's forwarding letter contained an admission that she had taken the study as far as she could; she hoped that Mom and/or I would pick up where she left off.  Mom was about the same age that I am now when she laid the envelope on my dining room table.

These ephemera have sat in boxes for some thirty years now. Recently, I have become acutely aware of my duty to pass this history on to the next generation. Time is passing. My children, however, have neither the space to accommodate the boxes, nor memories of stories that would put names to the faces in the photos. It’s up to me to make it real for them.

Mom (at left) in school play (ca. 1920)

My research campaign started in earnest over the last few weeks, as I dug more purposefully into the family tree that I set up long ago on Ancestry.com, a genealogy website. As I quickly plugged in the names I knew by heart – mother, father, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews – little leaves sprouted on the squares with their names. These were potentially relevant hints about historical records that have been scanned, entered into databases, and are available on the Internet. According to its website, Ancestry.com has more than 10 billion historical records available online. With more than 1.8 million worldwide subscribers, hints also come from the research of the multitudes of people in the world who are busily researching their own families. Not only is census data available, but also are city directories, agriculture censuses, industry censuses, news articles, genealogy reference books, local and state histories, historic photos, contemporary photos, and much more. Soon enough, I had entered some 240 people, with family trees upon trees upon trees.

Fishing in the Adirondacks (ca. 1917)

For the first week or so, I relied solely on the vague memories of Mother’s stories pushing their way up through my subconscious, while trying hard to keep the ancestors in the correct blood line. I waited until yesterday to open my mother’s manila envelope to check my work against hers. My mother had put her handwritten notes down on whatever was nearby when she heard the information – my guess is that she was constantly plying the relatives with questions as she ran into them. In the envelope were miscellaneous scraps of note paper and one-half of a yellowed paper plate, all carrying diagrams marked out with various names and dates. There were also multiple carbon copies on onionskin of a few typed paragraphs that traced the history of this family or that. Some records were typed out on the back of scrap letterhead. 

Mom in the first snow of the season (ca. 1915)

The good news is that, for the most part, my information is on point with my mother’s, and it has the benefit of many more sources cited as a cross-reference. My data took a few hours at the computer to accumulate. Hers took 10 years of painstaking effort -- interview by interview; page by page of uncounted volumes.  She and Lina would be amazed by how historical research is conducted these days. 

The tendrils of my family now extend out from my little square in all directions. Members of my mother’s family were property owners who stayed in one place for several generations, and are somewhat easy to trace. They already have many branches on their tree. My father’s family, however, consisted of Irish mill workers, leather tanners, stone cutters, and lumbermen who migrated around the northeast United States and southern Canada – wherever there was work. These folks were typically not formally documented in the usual reference sources, especially in the 19^th Century. Tracing their history will be my next challenge. 

Dad and Mom, newlyweds (1941)

The goal of all this is to answer questions that may have always hovered in my subconscious, but that have become more insistent in the past few years: What is our family story? Who are we in the larger scheme of things? Then, what is my story? What personality traits, talents, and quirks have I carried forward from previous generations? Finally, not a goal, but rather a hope: I would like to hand off to my sons a more organized collection of information about their ancestors, so that they, too, can answer those questions for themselves.

Preservation of these historical records for future generations is critical to our identity. It is very comforting for humans to connect with their past.  Like a spiritual GPS, our history enables us to locate the coordinates of our own little spot in the universe. I can't say that I have located mine in time and space yet, exactly - I keep getting diverted off into the side roads of my ancestry - but I will keep working at it. Like Lina, I may ultimately have to admit that I have done as much as I could, and hand off my virtual manila packet to the next generation. I hope that my sons will be as excited about this quest as I have been. 

Resources:

Ancestry.com. Official Website. Provo UT. URL http://ancestry.com accessed May 31, 2012.

Private Collections of Janet T. Delaney (dec’d), formerly of Endicott, NY.

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