Family & why their story matters
By Quentin Robinson, Tippecanoe County Historian
I recently finished a book which reminded me why, I think, learning about our family history is important or at least what drives those of us who do study and record the history of our families. Written by Ian Frazier it is called FAMILY and I recommend it if you are interested in family history, or even about history in general. It is, what I’d describe as, an unconventional Family History Book. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. It is quite unlike those more conventional works that often consist of tree charts and family charts full of dry facts about ancestors laid out in some sort of strange numerical order. This book was just a series of stories covering several individuals and generations of Frazier’s family. The thing about this style of writing a family history is that I found the stories interesting, even though none of the people were related to me and the locations were different from those where my own ancestors had lived. Frazier brought his “history” right up to the current time. He talked about his own parents and siblings, the death of his brother at a young age, and his own life. He’s just about 2 years younger than I am so I found much of his story vaguely familiar.
His stories are arranged in chronological order with the stories of earliest generations laid out first. Near the end of the book as he gets into more current stories he talked about the deaths of his parents and made what I thought was a profound statement about life. It put into words something I had felt but couldn’t really describe well and I think it has a lot to do with the reasons recording my own family history has been important for me.
Describing his feelings after his mother died and what he thought his future held he said; “And unknown things would happen, and sooner or later I would die, too – I understood that now, clearly, the way you suddenly become aware of the sky and the diving board after the person in front of you has jumped – and my kids perhaps would see me off as I had seen my parents off, or perhaps not. And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those who descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by a building where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and the graves of those who had tended ours would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives, husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of the forgotten, and on past those, into a space as white and big as the sky…. and all that would remain would be the love bravely expressed and the moment when you danced, and your heart danced with you.”
His description of the moment when the brevity of life finally comes into sharp focus struck me as quite profound and not a little jolting. Of course, we know, in an academic way from an early age, that we will all die. We play a little psychological trick with that knowledge, for many years we comfort ourselves with the idea that “well it will be a long time from now”, but eventually it dawns on all of us just what that means. The big picture eventually comes into focus for all of us with the realization that we are a small part of a much bigger picture. Often that sharpened focus comes about with the loss of our parents.
We tell ourselves that our efforts to document our family history and to tell those stories is something we do for our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren, but maybe it’s also for a more selfish reason…we want to be remembered. Most of us who live an average life span will, during that life span, probably have intimate contact with at least 5 different generations…. our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren. Some of us might even stretch that out a generation or two more than that. I had two great grandmothers that I remember and last fall I got to meet my first great grandchild.
The Revolutionary War seems distant today…but when thought of in terms of family it can seem much closer. My great grandfather Robinson sat on the knee of his grandmother Robinson and her cradle was rocked by her father, Isaac Davisson, a veteran of that war. Within the scope of family generations an event that seems so very long ago is just ever so slightly beyond the people I’ve personally known and that’s an amazing thought. There were still a few Civil War Veterans living when my own father went off to fight in World War II. Odds are that some of my grandchildren will live to see the next new century and certainly their children will. I want to give them some perspective on life and history and I want them to understand from whence they came and something about those that came before them, and of course that includes me.
