To Taos -- Maybe

I've been scheduled to go to Taos, NM, since March. As a challenge to my "J" or J-ness (for those who don't know what I'm talking about: The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Inventory), my friends who invited me have been on a blissed-out wedding adventure. Blessed with a dominant P (perceiving), and living, as it were, in Wonderland, anything is always possible -- so delightful!

Meanwhile, as Burns would have it, in his conversation with a field mouse, I have laid my best plans, but they predictably gang aft agley. A touch of anxiety stirs around the solar plexus, and I speak to it as if it were a person: "Calm down, it's all relative, and tomorrow will still be here one way or another."

Most recently, the new hubbie injured his hand, requiring therapy of some sort, so they could not haul out to Italy as originally planned. And, the hands are the living and the life of this happy couple. Injury would be disaster. So, travel to Taos was cancelled.

I began to make other plans, like going camping with the fam next week, writing in the mornings; working in the garden; replacing skins on the Airstream. Amazing how one's mind can transport through time, opening up possibilities, moving present to a future that does not exist.

Then, a few days ago, we're back on: the hand is not as bad as it seemed, and a honeymoon may still be do-able. The ticket still stands, so yes, I say, I can still go out to Taos!

The ticket is the only concrete future. Tomorrow is race day at the Indy 500. Traffic will be wild, and my flight is scheduled for 10:30 am, which means going to the track by maybe 8 am, or earlier, so R can get to the church on time. If she had a church in Speedway, she would not have church tomorrow :-) The plane will depart with me or without me. My mind sees both at the same time with equal valence.

Today is the day of decision, or is it?

Yes, my J-ness is challenged by their P-ness, and I wait ...

... and I wait ...

Genealogy Research and Accidents of Fate

Genealogy Research and Accidents of Fate

Anne G. McWilliams

May 5, 2010

Genealogy is something I thought I might get into when I retired, like most of the people I know who have kept the records in my family. It seemed to me that genealogy research required long hours in libraries searching microfiches of poorly scanned images of newspapers, government records, and ephemera donated from private libraries. One of my mother's cousins and I used to talk about driving to North Carolina to find the record of our Scottish ancestor's arrival in America. Such research must require time and boredom to become an obsession. Or does it?

I was dragged into genealogy recently, out of curiosity about my father’s family. The vacuum created by the void of stories became stronger in the past year in credit to forces beyond my control. I say “beyond my control” with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude, referring to my decision to overcome travel exhaustion and get myself up and out to church on an early Sunday morning, something later I would be tempted to call “a God thing”.

At church that morning, I met a Muslim Imam, our guest preacher, Mikal Saahir. It turns out he is a descendant of a person who was enslaved by my ancestor. I have written a good bit about that meeting. I’ll distill to this one droplet: Mikal and I met because of one simple reason – my church encourages members to wear name tags. This social-club practice is more or less common, gaining in popularity with churches seeking to attract and keep new members.

As a result of meeting Mikal, I have found many facets of reflection upon the human drama of race, politics, religion, manners, morals, and memory. Two facets emerged and merged during the same day. For one, some time ago, I applied to work with the 2010 Census. I didn't get the job, but I did run into a friend at the screening exam. We met for lunch yesterday. And, yesterday, I went to vote in the Indiana primary election. The convergence of these federal functions is the basis for my story today.

Going to the polls is a chore. Rachel says I am irrationally upset by this: our neighbor is an official with the poll workers, yet insists upon campaigning for the Republican Party far inside the 50 foot limit, inside the polling place. It's hard to deal with this, because he is a beloved retired teacher. Alas, this is not a battle I want to choose at the moment. I recognize a familiar transference reaction to my own father’s entrenched conservatism. Therefore, I won’t say anything. Maybe this is fodder for another essay. Besides, my intransigent Republican neighbor very kindly asked about my adventure in genealogy of late. Voting and the Census -- I'll bring it all together, I promise.

I joined Ancestry.com one night around 10:00 p.m. I paid the trial fee and began my search. I could not believe my eyes. I typed in the outline of my family tree, beginning with my father, and adding the few names I knew of his ancestors. From time to time, I would return to the tree to find little green leaves on some of the names, especially the males of the spousal pairs (most every one of those pairs appeared to have been officially married).

Clicking on the green leaves, I would find hints that held the possibility of confirming the vital statistics of that person, spouse, children, and other members of the household. Other genealogists had made links to my ancestors, and thanks to them, I could link documents containing details I would otherwise never find on my own. I could not believe it, finding out so much so quickly about my family. One ancestor, for example, had a record of slave ownership recorded by the federal slave census in 1850. He had at least 17 slaves. I am vague about the number because my eyes were crossing with sleep deprivation.

[Recently, I became equally obsessed with a game on my iPhone: Tap Out. I worked the free version incessantly until I reached the end. I stopped talking to my family, except to draw them into the game to help me. Now, they are all working on Tap Out, but they won’t finish it as fast as I did because they have job and school schedules, and they go to bed religiously at 9:00 p.m. Losers. Slackers.]

Never mind. My family slept peacefully in their beds upstairs; the dogs were asleep in their crates in my study. I heard them whimpering their chasing dreams in little dog-lip muffled barks. Meanwhile I sat on my round blue exercise ball, squinting at the MacBook screen, tracking down census reports, Social Security Death records, marriage licenses, and other confirming documents, linking confirmations to the people in my growing family tree. I kept up this click-and-shock game until 4:30 a.m. Good thing I do not have a job working for someone else. This could become a habit affecting my performance.

The next day, or, rather, later the same day, I had lunch with my friend who is working for the 2010 US Census. On the way to meet him, my unconscious, hard at work with all the preconscious details of my search, dredged up and delivered to me a little gem of insight.

The census forms prior to the Civil War (1850, for example) were quite simple: names, ages, skin color, birthplace of father and mother, value of property. After the Civil War, Jim Crow showed up.

Limestone County, Alabama, and Giles County, Tennessee, were the main census forms I was finding, thanks to other, more serious genealogists who had followed their own links to my ancestors. The forms became quite complex after the Civil War. For example, forms after 1860 asked if inhabitants had attended school in the past year; could the inhabitants read and write; did the inhabitants rent or own property?

I recalled from my history lessons that persons with black skin color could not vote at the time. States and the federal government differed in policies. The “three-fifths human” policy in effect since the seventeenth century continued well into the 20^th century. In this policy, blacks were not considered to be fully human, and therefore lacked the full capacity to give consent to the government by voting. Women also shared this inability to give full consent for the same reason: they lacked the full powers of reason required to engage in the responsibility of electing those who would govern the state and the country.

Later, as full humanity became bestowed upon blacks (and women) in order to vote, blacks had to overcome an unofficial but life-threatening obstacle: to pass a reading test and a writing test. African Americans were lynched and shot for attempting to register to vote, even as in slavery they were murdered when discovered to be able to read and write. Fannie Lou Hamer, in the middle of the 20^th Century in Mississippi, was beaten almost to death, leaving her maimed for life with a limp, because of her effort to gain the franchise for black folks. The three Civil Rights workers murdered and buried in the earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi, were, according to the local politicians, “Yankee agitators”, out to register black people to vote for the Democrats in the national elections.

Now, a zealous convert to my own personal genealogy, I am dying to get my hands on these actual documents. I need my own proof of these names, these records of census takers who visited my ancestors and interviewed them.

Those long-ago census workers walked across the creek, up the path, and across the plank porch of a cabin I now own on 80 acres in Limestone County, Alabama. Those census workers exchanged air in a room with my ancestors. Their oxygenated blood empowered muscles that moved an old-fashioned dip pen across the page of an official government document, recording names and vital statistics. (The writer, Shelby Foote, kept that close to the page, writing the first drafts of all of his manuscripts with dip pens, with Esterbrook Probate 313 nibs.) 

As my own fingers strike these keys on this peripheral keyboard, and the print-like image of letters appears across the page-like image on the screen, my fingers stop and flex and imagine the scritch across the dry leaf as the census enumerator recorded those names and details. They also demonstrated varying ways of spelling the names. And, in transcribing the names in the Ancestry.com database, some scribes made some curious errors. For example, my mother’s ancestors, Bowers, became Boviera in the electronic documentation that accompanies the facsimile of the form. Fortunately or unfortunately, paying members of Ancestry.com can correct these errors.

The census is important, we know, for calculating public service needs and taxation to support healthcare, safety, and education. However, it is easy to see how census taking might be viewed with suspicion and reluctance today. As the census worker recorded details of property, literacy, and relationship, they were also drawing back tightly upon a bow-string that would release its killing energy upon its target for another ten years ahead.

My new friend and possible relation, Mikal Saahir is descended from people who could not vote, whose lives depended upon their ongoing servitude to my white ancestors for decades after the Civil War. Their chattel status continued long after the law of the land affirmed their humanity, their capacity for reason, their right to vote and participate in their own governance.

In a census year, 2010, I am mindful of the ease with which I completed and mailed my household census form, even though my marriage status continues to be denied by the state and diminished by its record as “domestic partner”. Facebook, Twitter, Ancestry.com, are all new since the last census. The online facsimiles of the old records of past decades and centuries provide stunning reminders of the unknowing ways in which we accumulate a record of our humanity, our moral decisions, our exercise of justice.

Historians and literary critics urge us to avoid the fallacy of anachronism. Pointing to the uses of census taking in the past must not be interpreted as a sign of future continued abuses, they say. Did a government of a state, say, Alabama, in a decade, say, 1880s, in an era, say, of Reconstruction misuse the cold facts of a census form as a weapon against darker-skinned human beings? If those dark-skinned ones were not fully human in 1880, should we fault the State for treating them like animals?

Other critics say we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the benighted white leaders of a benighted era made a categorical mistake that they could not help but make, should we discount also the good they tried to do? The cold light of observation cannot but filter through the accumulations of those people who actually were fully human all along, people living out actual realities across the generations, and accumulating a record of having been sinned against by those who made “a big mistake”. 

Not discounting my own personal and private pains and sufferings interspersed throughout a life of blessedness, I have known such small suffering, and immeasurable benefits from my own accidents of fate. I ended up on the winning side of history, thus far, because my ancestry treated fellow humans like animals. Somehow, “sorry” just doesn’t measure up.

All of this reflection came about during the lunch hour between lunch with the census enumerator and exercising my right at the voting booth, prompted by investigating my family of the past online. Maybe after dinner, I can work on world peace.