- My grandfather died years before my birth, and I only knew him through the pictures.
- A few years ago, I started looking for genealogy to better understand my family.
- I learned a lot about my grandfather, and although I will not know him personally, I am proud of him.
I never met my grandfather, but he was always a greater personality in our family. Known as affection by my oldest cousin in the name of grandfather Louis, he was born in 1919 and died in 1987, a few years before my birth. I often felt the theft of a relationship with him, although the stories and images fill some of the holes left by his absence.
Sometimes, if I try hard enough, I can imagine to be the back of the ridiculous jokes, and play with him family games made up of the front yard, or ask for tales of his life as a truck driver and work with the Teamsters team in Flint, Michigan. It helps a bit that my six father and his six brothers share many of the grandfather’s physical features (the most important baldness between them), but still feels a loss.
When I decided to dive into family genealogy a few years ago, my goals were simple: I wanted to put the path that prompted my family to Michigan from abroad. I knew more about the background of my father’s grandmother, but not much about the grandfather Louis. I subscribed to Ancestry.com and Dove in, not sure if I would find anything interesting.
I never expected how it would make me feel.
I found a lot
Within days of starting my pursuit, I discovered the treasures. There were pictures of my grandfather that I had not seen before, along with the military documents that were signing. I calculated his life at every turn, and I find a context of family stories and make comparisons with my life. Years ago, I sorted through a box of sweet love messages between the grandfather Louis and my grandmother while serving abroad. I felt a nice introduction to the grandfather. Formatives brought me even closer.
I am dealing with the years of my younger grandmother by seeing newspapers from his small hometown, and I feel dizzy when I find or love him. The Marvelous Mandanity acquired my imagination: there was a description of egg connections and farm trading for “beautiful pigs” between my great uncles. A frequent theme on the paper was to report the latest injuries and diseases that afflict my great grandmother, Louis’s mother. Perhaps the most amazing, I stumbled on a letter published to Santa Claus, written by the same grandfather at the age of seven.
I felt that he was closer to him whenever I found
The deeper, the deeper, the more I feel this man who is part of me, but I never looked at it in the eye. Through pictures, documents and newspaper extracts – that I had never seen my father or brothers – I felt as if I was grandfather, and I was working on a secret project together as if he had left me evidence to discover throughout his life.
Moreover, I tracked the mother’s line in the grandfather to Ireland through my third great grandmother, Sabina, who left Achille Island during the famine of the potato. She was only 22 years old, asked a dangerous trip to Canada by boat and immigrated to the west of the west in the United States, where she settled, married and married the family line that allowed me to exist.
The descriptions that were discovered during my genealogy journey included the local population accounts about the warm behavior of Sabina, the nature of the diligent, and the tendency to share the stories of her life in Ireland. Because she lived in the nineties of the last century, I was lucky enough to find two pictures of us – such treasures and rewards expected in my pursuit.
While continuing to follow the life of the grandfather Louis through the birth of his ten children and his luxurious professional life as a truck driver, it inevitably arrived in 1987, the year in which he died due to the complications of leukemia. There was an obituary to tell the basics of his life and death, yes, but there were also articles in the newspapers praising his work.
A piece in Flint magazine described it as calm and good, even quoting a few jokes. I don’t know how his voice appeared, but reading his words is a gift. He praised the other pieces after his death in his dedication to union work, describing it as a “institution.” I did not know that feeling such pride for a person you hadn’t met before was possible.
He did not return it
Dive into the world of amateur genealogy did not restore my grandfather, nor did it completely reduce the outbreak of sadness that I feel that our paths have never crossed. But he gave me a gift of knowledge and the ability to communicate with my grandfather, every copy of himself-from the young boy who writes messages to Santa Claus to the young military man of the driver and the father with a older person.
There is peace in knowing that the worldly things we leave behind may concern those who come after us. The documents we sign, the pictures that we present, and the quick quotes that we share with local correspondents, annual books, and messages. These small segments of personal history create a gate between us and our family members.
It will always be correct that I did not meet my grandfather Loy. No search, photographs, or incandescent articles can change this. But I feel comfortable knowing that a lot of pieces of it are still here, alive, tucked safely in my folder of genealogy discoveries.
