Day # 55 Chills and Rewards

Signing on for research of dead people is like inviting new relatives into your life.  They carry all the baggage that your real, living relatives carry, but you can't smack them around or tell them you never want to see them again.  Nor can you talk to them and ask them the questions you want to ask.  Instead of a nice in-person answer to a question from a living, breathing relative, you end up with hours and days of chasing one wisp of a document up dead ends and blind alleys until you realize that this scrap of answer may be the only one you will ever get.

I like my living relatives just fine, but if I had my druthers, I would opt for a few conversations with William Perry Knight or, Caleb Etheridge, ancestors of mine who have brought on sleepless nights and pleading letters to librarians in small towns.  I had to bring in a hired gun to help with William Knight, my Great-great-great-grandfather.  And I owe a debt of gratitude far more than the donation I made to a library in North Carolina for the amazing help of the local librarian there while trying to research land deeds of an Etheridge.

The people keeping me up nights these days are not even kin.  There is no blood connection at all.  Hours slip by as I plot out birth dates, rejoice at a small NY Times obit or birth announcement.  A marriage announcement tells me where someone went to University or what their rank was in the US Army.  Bit by bit, the dead give up the details of their lives through the documentation left behind of isolated moments in time.  Read carefully, an engagement announcement will tell you that the mother father of the groom are separated, but not divorced.

So you may be able to imagine my deepening sense of connection when the passport application photo of my main research subject slowly resolved itself on my computer screen.  There he is, in 1917, looking like a young man ready to take on the world in his high starched collar.  He is heading from New York City to Calcutta, India to become an important player in an overseas trading company, one with which he will remain connected for over fifty years.

Hours and hours of work and suddenly, there he is.  Even though I have a chart of his travels, know when he was born and died and where, the picture is a huge reward.  Its a down payment on the year of research that lies ahead.