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| My grandfather, Harold Francis Lienert |
This month I've been working on my family's genealogy which I find fascinating. It's not because my ancestors are famous or even particularly virtuous because they are not. Instead, they were the blue collar industrial muscle of North, laboring as masons, carpenters, working in steel mills, shoving coal, feeding furnaces. And on my husband's side, they were the agricultural backbone of the South where I read "farmer, farmer, laborer, farmer..." going down the occupational column on each US census. They were common people who lived their common lives largely unnoticed.
Yet, there is a story within each family, a story for each name I document. Some of their stories scream and others whisper. As a collective pile, I feel their heft on my soul. The tragedy part is loud--the regular loss of young life, the infant deaths without names, the sometimes abrupt absence of a key person on a subsequent census when they should be listed. Sometimes I find an explanation, but most of the time, I am left wondering. I see the train-wreck from above but not the detailed fleshing out, the collective impact on that generation, those lives....
It also strikes me regularly that the past is littered with tombstones of people, people just like me, who were busy with the immediacy of their lives, running, running, running, and now they sit fixed under a slowly weathering stone. I will join them someday...sooner or later, only God knows.
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| My mother, Jane Smith Lienert and my oldest sister, Kathy, circa 1959 |
Some of them faithfully plop themselves down at the same residence or on the same piece of land decade after decade, while others skip around eluding my detection. Some are wily, others just clueless. There are the carefree types, who jumped from whim to whim, occupation to occupation, residence to residence, and then their are the ones that ring of a darker instability.
And after downloading so many tombstone images to upload them to my Ancestry site, I've become a bit of a connoisseur of tombstones. How do you sum up a life through stonework? Do you wish to share a stone with your spouse? your children? Some women have "mother..." as their describing word ---others have "wife of..." No occupational titles make the stones....we are all mostly reduced to birth and death dates. All sobering food for thought.
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| My great-grandmother Frances Norris, a widow at the age of 28. |
I've never been quite sure what I think of cremation, but after working in the genealogy mines, I think I prefer the thought of a physical grave-site, cremation or no cremation. We are physical people and it's nice to have a physical place to go and think about those who have come before us. Cremation and this sprinkling of ashes is too utilitarian and caustic for my tastes. I think I'd rather rot in the ground like a seed, one of my favorite images from 1 Corinthians. Stones give a person a place to go--if they want to.
Genealogy is trivial, momentous, tedious, humbling, grim work. It requires that I draw close, pulling out a microscope to focus on seemingly inconsequential details. It equally requires that I draw back and take an expansive view---toward their lives, my life and the significance or insignificance of it all. Wandering the online graveyards pulls me back to the question of what it means to a wife, a mother, a child, a child of God.
I believe the details are significant, which is why I lovingly labor over them. In a way, it's a tiny nod to who they were, what they've given me through the gift of their lives. Each person, each generation, has a one-time shot at that. Each of us enters the grand parade at our ordained time, having our own singular opportunity to shape our life and the lives of our children.
