The Inheritance - the beginning

When a baby is born, one of the first things everyone does is identify who he looks like. "He has Jacob's eyes... Melissa's ears... that smile and the clef in his chin are his grandfather's. Look at those long fingers -- those are piano-playing fingers like his Aunt Allison's." We look for the links, the clues that hint at belonging. We look for the hand-me-downs our genetic code gives us that make us simultaneously uniquely ourselves and completely un-originally part of something bigger than ourselves.

Some of us allow that fascination with belonging to drive us to identify our roots -- the who we are and where we come from. I am one of the people afflicted by this fascination, as others have been before me. I marvel to think that if one immigrant had chosen not to leave Germany or Norway or England or France for a new land, if one had died on the journey, if one Civil War cannonball had flown more true, if one couple had not fallen in love or married by decree, if a miscarriage had not ended a pregnancy early so that another could develop, if illness had not spared the life of a child -- I would not be here to wonder about any of it.

Perhaps this fascination (like my tendency to turn my plate and eat each thing on it one at a time as it occupies the space directly in front of me) is just part of my inheritance. I don't know. I do know that I spring from a long line of people who are permanently linked to one another because, by virtue of bearing a child, they are each strands in the thread that makes world history my history.

I can't really describe how or why it is so satisfying to make a small discovery that brings me to a stranger father, a distant mother, I didn't know -- that allows me to fill one more box with a name and date and a place. I can't explain it except to say that there is a profound comfort in the growing sense I have that all of the circumstances of their lives conspired to make mine possible. I'm not quite narcissistic enough to imagine that I am the end their lives were moving towards. However, I imagine that every generation made choices in hopes that the future would be brighter for their children and their children's children. Somewhere along the line, that child was me.

It is difficult from this distance in time and space to imagine what some of the lives I am discovering must have been like. Who was Ingeborg, and why did she, at 18, choose to leave her Norse river valley for the wild newness of America? I can make a pretty solid guess as to why. Her reasons must have been much the same as those of her fellow expatriates, as approximately one-third of the Norwegian population sailed as she did over the course of several decades; but I still wonder if she was afraid when she bundled up what little she had and endured, in all likelihood, two sea voyages in cramped, crowded conditions. What was the American dream as it played out in her life? Did she miss the majestic peaks and ice-chilled tilled earth of Norway when she traded it for blustery Wisconsin winters where language and custom and everything was alien?

Her story, like those of so many others whose names and lives preceded mine, has been lost to lost to us. Still, here, at my computer desk in North Carolina, in November of 2007, I can reach out to the frigid Norway of the 1860s with my questions and find, at least, where she was born. Somehow that little gesture is full of meaning for me. It is my small way of thanking her for living, for taking the risks and making the choices that, in the great fire of life, allowed for the forging of my family.

I fancy that I learn something about myself when I learn about Ingeborg and James Madison and Nancy Mary Bennett and all of my near and distant forebears. I imagine, sometimes, that learning what I can about them fills some of the gaps in my own experience. Really, it helps me find meaning in a sink full of dirty dishes, another depressing news story, the passing of a season and the dawning of a new morning when I would rather wallow in the murky darkness of sleep. Somehow, hundreds of ordinary everyday lives conspire to make new lives possible, and my own life may become part of someone else's inheritance.

I suppose one of the reasons I write is a desire to be remembered, to leave something lasting in the world when I am no longer her to imprint myself on the minds of others. As it is, I think I leave a few blackened pixels in cyperspace -- hardly a magnum opus. However, there is a part of me that wonders... if my great-great-great-granddaughter found something I had written in her search of whatever has supplanted the Internet by her time, would she read it with as much wonder and interest as I did the letter I found from my great-great-great-grandmother a few weeks ago? I don't suppose it matters, really. I mean, the measure of our lives has almost nothing to do with what the centuries recall of them if they recall, them at all: but still, I wonder.

In the meantime, I will periodically share what I have learned of the legacy others have left for me. I imagine I won't bother trying to make it chronological (or even logical, for that matter), but as a paltry gift for those living people who share my bloodline and my curiosity about where we came from, I will leave this record. Perhaps it will become, in its own poor way, a small part of our shared inheritance.