This story—the mystery I’ve stumbled across. Like Alice, I’ve tumbled into the twisting, gravitational pull of someone else’s rabbit hole and I have no idea where or when I’ll land.
Thrilling, captivating, and surprising, I’ve been
stunned and shocked by what I’ve discovered. But there are still too many gaps
to reveal whether he was a hero, a zero, or just another human being with
feet of clay.
Like me.
I blame it on that photograph.
It’s just a simple framed picture of my
great-grandparents on their wedding day, taken more than one hundred years
ago. Which sounds like forever until
I stop to realize that, if life had not been so hazardous at the time, they
would have both lived long enough for me to have met them. After all, my
grandchildren still have three living great-grandparents and will always have
their very own, personal memories of them.
All I have is a faded photograph. And the internet.
The wedding portrait hung in Grandma’s bedroom. For
a few years following her death, it hung in my dining room. Eventually, I gave
it to my aunt in exchange for a smaller version, and now it adorns her wall. Ironically, it’s traveled
almost as many miles as the couple who gaze out stoically from within its
frame.
Grandma told me she barely knew them. Her parents,
the couple in the photo, both died of tuberculosis by the time she was ten years old.
“I was born in South Carolina,” she said. “My mother
was disowned by her family when she married my Irish Catholic father, because
he was divorced. I had no siblings and, when mama and daddy died, I was raised
in Arizona by my foster parents,” she said. “Now eat your potatoes.”
Grandma rarely minced words, so I thought that’s all
there was to the story. She was born. She was orphaned. She was adopted. She
grew up. Life was hard, but she got over it. End of story. End of questions.
But one afternoon, years after I passed the portrait
on, replacing it with a tabletop version, I ran across a handwritten family tree
that Grandma gave me forty-five years ago. Then I sat down next to my husband,
Rob, plugged some of the names into Ancestry.com, and out of Pandora’s internet
box tumbled hundreds of puzzle pieces—completely out of order—containing a fascinating story of Grandma’s parents.
It’s incomplete, though.
It reminds me of bagged yard sale puzzles I’ve
bought a few times—lots of pieces, no idea what the end result should resemble.
If not for a couple of facts in the family tree Grandma gave me, we’d have
never discovered anything about her
family. She didn’t say much about it when she gave the booklet to me, but I
think she knew that, someday, I’d go looking for another picture of her parents
and I’d need a little help.
So far, I’ve spent about four months coaxing my
computer to spit out their records. And while the internet plays a mean game of
cat and mouse, I’ve earned its respect by being tenacious. All I knew of my
great-grandfather before Ancestry.com came along was his name and birthdate.
And that he was from County Cork, Ireland.
But he wasn’t from County Cork.
Nor did Grandma’s own grandparents disown their
daughter for marrying him.
I assumed he was an only child, just like Grandma,
since all I knew was his name and birthdate. But imagine my surprise and
delight the evening the names of his eight siblings surfaced on the internet
and revealed that he was from Galway County, Ireland.
But here’s the thing—Grandma wasn’t an only child,
either.
Her father was married once before marrying Grandma’s
mother and fathered five children, including two who died as infants. Also,
Grandma’s parents lost a baby boy the year before she was born. In all, her father welcomed seven children into the world. So while she
grew up as an only child, and though she knew of them but never met them, Grandma
actually had three half-brothers. Somewhere.
Guess who now knows where they grew up?
Oh, internet. You are a remarkable, magical thing.
You are also my tormentor. You supply the facts but
make me analyze their hidden meanings. You prove existence but not intent. You
name names but hide hopes and dreams. You expose heartache but ignore
conclusions.
How can I assemble a jigsaw puzzle when all I have
to go on is speculation?
He was always a shadow of a man to me, just one photograph
away from being invisible. Now I have over a hundred documents proving his existence
but no explanation of his choices.
Except for one. The one where he adopted out the
only child he ever had a relationship with—because he was dying of tuberculosis.
In all the years he spent in America’s military and
all the years he traveled the world, the most important act of bravery he ever
exhibited was when he found a family for his daughter, my grandmother, in the
months before he passed away. He gave up all his rights to her while he was
still living, but found a family to love and protect her at the end of his own life.
In the end, he died alone and uncelebrated, two thousand miles from his
wife’s grave in South Carolina, five thousand miles from his childhood home in
Ireland, his name mentioned in dozens of newspaper articles but missing from
his own headstone. Today his body rests
under a eucalyptus tree in an unmarked grave in Phoenix, Arizona.
I don’t know why I know more about Grandma’s father
than she did. I don’t know why her story was so condensed as to blur the lines
of reality. Maybe it’s because I was a kid and kids don’t need to know the pain
their grandparents experienced when they were
kids. I bet the internet won’t explain any of that to me, either.
For now, I have that photograph. And the internet.
And my own speculation. And gratitude to the man whose protection of my
grandmother led to my own birth and the powerful bond I once shared with her. He was not a zero. He was a hero.
That’s a pretty good piece of the puzzle.
