Finding the Past, Seeing the Future

Family is so important---past, present and future. This fact was driven home on Monday when I spent a beautiful summer day with my niece roaming a couple of cemeteries looking for ancestors. We found my great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, within two minutes of entering the veteran’s cemetery. The lots, plots and rows were well marked and easy to find without even getting out of the car. As my niece said, “That’s the government.” Given the fact that he died in 1917, his stone was in remarkable condition (see photo above). He was only in my mother’s life for six years before he died but his life and military service took up three pages in the family history book I wrote last winter. It still amazes me that I was able to find details about the type of bullet he took in the head and the various hospitals where he recuperated but I don’t know how he took his morning coffee. Note to future family historians: I like mine with Italian sweet cream.

In another cemetery it took us quite a while and an iPad with a screen shot of the cemetery map plus counting plots, rows and tombstones to determine that my grandparents never got markers placed on their graves. Nothing that says, “I was here, don’t forget me.” Guessing the reasons why makes sense when we thought about what was going on in the family in 1922 and 1945, when they died, but it was a bit of a let-down for our “stones and lunch quest" and it made me sad that they ended up in unmarked graves. I never knew my grandparents. Still, the stories told over the years made them “real” to me. Growing up, I was so jealous of my best friend because her grandparents lived within walking distance and I’d go there with her after school sometimes. I credit them for teaching me to love antiques. Her grandfather’s face lit up when he’d tell stories about his treasures. Now I’m the one with stories about the obsolete things I have collected over years. Hopefully, what goes around comes around and I’ll spark a love of old things in someone born in this century.

I asked my niece if she thought her descendants will be walking around a cemetery in a 100 years looking for her granite marker. She didn’t know but afterward I thought about it and I realized that in the not so distant future it won’t be necessary. With the popularity of “living headstones” aka QV codes growing rapidly, GPS will take people right to a grave and when they get there they’ll be able to use their smartphones to view pictures, movies and the eulogy of the deceased. I keep thinking I want to get the QV code for Don’s stone---they only cost $50, the last time I checked---but that task keeps hanging down at the bottom of my ‘to do someday’ list.  Maybe I’ll put a clause in my will requiring my heirs to create QV files for both Don and me before they get any money. “That sneaky Aunt Jean,” they’d say, “reaching out from the grave like that to blackmail us into doing her bidding!” 

My niece and I had lunch at a quirky restaurant, a former railway station that only has two booths and thirteen counter seats for customers. They make the best malts and hamburgers in town---not just my opinion. They’ve been voted as such a few times. The place has been “in the family” since, well, forever it seems. Owned by my cousin then passed down to his daughter and son-in-law, it’s a city landmark that’s fun to visit. It’s too bad restaurants with L-shaped lunch counters lined with stools went out of fashion. No one stays a stranger long in a place like that. It’s the kind of place where the customers introduce themselves when you sit down. Cooking in that fishbowl on the other side of the counter, though, would be my nightmare job. You’d not only have to know what you’re doing on the grill but you’d also have to be able to kibitz and kid with the customers, tell jokes and keep the politician debates from getting out of hand. I don’t multi-task well when cooking is involved and I’d probably want to burn the burgers of a few people whose outrageous political views seem to come straight out of the twilight zone. 

When I got back home I got a call from my nephew’s very excited wife. She had good news. Both of her kids have been married awhile and both of them just found out they are having their first babies within weeks of each other. Her son’s baby---my future great-great nephew or niece---gives the family a 50-50 chance of having someone to carry on the family surname. That’s something I’d very much like to see before I die. Whether my nephew and his wife become the grandparents of two boys or two girls or one of each, I will need to get my knitting needles back out. Life is good when you can see family far back in the past and far into the future at the same time---that’s the pure joy of continuity that bridges the centuries. ©