My Ancestry.com

My father died in 1996, suddenly, and completely unexpectedly.
He was 59. He was luxuriating in early retirement from a successful career, when a massive stroke caught us all by surprise. It's likely that, had he known he was going to die, we would have managed to spend some quality time together during his final days. Maybe some of my questions would have been answered.

We were distant, but not estranged.
I was 29, and had been making an effort to get over our past conflicts. We were on a slow mend.

When my father died, he took his family history with him.
I had known his parents, but I knew nothing about their people. I saw them a total of five times in my life. I loved them dearly, idolized them from afar. They were my black family, my grandparents who lived in Harlem. What little I knew, I gleaned from short anecdotes they shared, and the simple facts my father offered in hopes of quieting my curiosity. My grandfather had worked as a pullman porter, sign painter, elevator operator, and banjo player. My grandmother suffered from glaucoma, but still held a clerical job with the NYPD for many years, and played piano. Every visit featured an impromptu jamboree, their tired bodies rocking and swaying to the old-time tunes they played by heart.

I never asked them where they came from.
Where were they born? Who were their parents? These were black people born at the turn of the twentieth century. How did they experience Jim Crow? Segregation? How did they come to be educated? Were their parents the children of slaves? Sharecroppers? Did they have brothers and sisters? Nieces, nephews? Where was everybody?

Grandma's photo albums held the only clues.
She made notes on the backs of some of the pictures, with names, places and dates. But they were first names. And places like "Woods house, Massachusetts". The folks in the pictures were fair-skinned. Same as my grandparents. So the likelihood of Irish and Native American bloodlines, as referenced by my father once in non-explicit terms, seemed viable. But what were the real stories? And how would I find them?

I am writing a book.
It is memoir, a coming of age story: my life as the biracial daughter of a black man who decidedly disconnected from "the black world".  I have hundreds of pages written, some of which will appear in chapter form somewhere in this blog, as it evolves. My father left a lot of stones unturned, and the writing has been helping me clear my head. I want to understand who he was, and why he chose the paths he did. The writing exposed a huge hole: I can't tell his story without knowing the family details he kept secret. I flash on the microfilm research I did in high school, and the ancient public records that might shed a trace of light on where my grandparents came from. And I've heard that a lot of those public records are accessible on the web site Ancestry.com. It seems like a place to start. So I put aside an afternoon and try to have faith. I imagine I will stumble through a tangle of family trees, produced by countless irrelevant strangers, linking arms/branches across nations; the blissful interconnectivity of all humans. Sprinkle fairy dust here.

Ancestry.com unlocked the answers.
First impression, the simplicity of the search protocol was too good to be true. But after a few carefully crafted stabs, I learned that my grandfather was born in Asbury Park, NJ in 1906. He was one of six children. I learned the names of his parents, his grandparents, and his great-grandparents. And my grandmother's story was just as clear. The trail started with their marriage certificate. Then their death certificates, and birth certificates. Aged, handwritten documents held the details of their lives, perfectly legible, even the complete address of the "Woods house, Massachusetts". With the help of GoogleMaps, I was able to locate that house without leaving my desk. And I unearthed a long chain of cousins, some of whom posted their family trees, ripe with my history.

The stories are making sense.
The people and places have names. The cousins are out there. I will keep writing, and continue searching, and wondering.