Balthasar. Two Zephiniahs. Christenia. Arzilla.  I whispered my ancestors’ names as I clicked and clicked, tracing my family tree back to the 1620s, to a John Spencer, who lived in Virginia.

Galileo hadn’t yet been forced to renounce the idea that planets orbited the sun. The Taj Mahal had not been completed. It would be another forty years before Milton would publish Paradise Lost, but my boy John Spencer was hanging out in Virginia.

It’s amazing to me that I can know this, that I can sit in my rocking chair in the dark, avoiding sleep, and ask a little magic box who my great grandparents’ parents were. Who their great grandparents were. Who their great grandparents were.

A spark

I’ve never really been interested in genealogy. Despite a vague feeling of connection to a few people in my family’s history, I’ve always kind of feined interest when people tell me about their family trees and even when I’ve seen my own. It was just names. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the information or why it really mattered.

Working more on my book, though, has had me thinking more about my great grandmother, my paternal grandma’s mother, Arzilla Mae. Apparently when I was born my dad felt her presence in the room and that knowledge has given me a small fascination with her. I see myself in her pictures. I feel a little like I know her, though she died at age 92, 9 years before I was born.

On a whim the other night I googled her name and was struck by a picture of her I had never seen before, uploaded by a cousin. In this one she’s the spitting image of my grandma, lounging under a quilt. She’s leaning on her father’s knee and they’re holding hands. The tenderness is palpable. His face is kind. I suddenly needed to know who this man was, my great great grandfather, who seemed to be looking at me from over a hundred years ago.

I was amazed at what I was able to find and how easily. His name was Zephiniah and he was married once before my great great grandmother. There had to be a story there. The writer in me wanted to write it. The grandaughter in me wanted to know it. For the first time, I felt the call that so many others have felt– just to know.  I clicked and clicked, retracing my steps when I met dead ends and following another branch up the family tree.

As incredible as it seemed initially that I could trace my ancestry back to the 17th century with the touch of a finger tip, that feeling was replaced with the knowledge that that was as much as I could know about these people– their names, spouses, places and dates of birth and death.

I’ll never know who the two people in the window are or why they weren’t in the photo. I’ll probably never know the story about Zephiniah and his first wife. I’ll never know what Christenia was like or how John Spencer’s family came to Virginia. The idea that it isn’t recorded somewhere, that there’s no one on earth who could tell me, that there are stories that are lost, really and truly lost, is almost unfathomable. My mind, so used to the idea that you can find out anything just by Googling it, or at least by Google Scholaring it, almost can’t process the concept that I can know these people’s names and nothing else.

Enough

But maybe that’s enough. Can you imagine John Spencer, a decade after the King James Bible was published, knowing that 400 years later, in California, his great great great great great something granddaughter would say his name?

Maybe, I’ve decided, that’s all we can ask. A part of every person whose name I read was in me before I ever thought about who the individuals were– their blood, their fears, their hopes. The idea that something else could remain– a name, an acknowledgment that they lived, is magic.

Have you been bitten by the desire to know your genealogy? What have you found? Tell me in the comments!