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Sunday, March 9, 2008

Roots

The roots of my family tree are sunk deep into the earth. There are no princes or barons in my lineage. The ranks are full of farmers and laborers, hard-working people with hard lives and common names that speak of a European history: Thomas Bennett, Anna Hilton, Jacob Miller.

For the most part, I have just names, dates of birth and death, and occupations gleaned from historical records gathered by the government; there is little else remaining of these dozens of people. I wonder who they were, what were their dreams, did they ever wonder how their family tree would grow and what they would pass down to their children’s children?

Census records provide small clues yet raise more questions. The 1900 census tells me that my great-great grandfather Samuel Renner resided then in Otsego, Indiana, with his wife, Catie, and their six children. Twenty years later, the wife and children were gone and, at the age of 54, he had moved in with his elderly parents. Under “occupation,” the census taker wrote “none.”

What was his story?

And what of John and Jane Kilpatrick, my great-great-great grandparents? Born in Ireland, they trekked across the Atlantic Ocean in 1874 with several kids in tow. Why did they move? And what of the country they landed in, not even a decade out of the Civil War?

Four generations later, the homestead they established in Nebraska is still being farmed by my family.

Those were the generations when families were large by necessity, when everyone was needed to pitch in, to drive the cattle, to reap the harvest, to build the house out of sod, to care for each other in the absence of hospitals. It must have been a hard life, but I believe their lives were just as satisfying and full as mine in bright, loud and scattered 2008. At the very least, they had each other and their land.

And while their history is not glamorous, I’m proud to be from a family that was connected to the earth and to each other. I wish that I had known these people. My life is immeasurably different from John and Jane Kilpatrick, Samuel Renner, Thomas Bennett and scores of others, but I believe that we also share more than genetics.

I remember my grandmother, who loved nothing more than to walk through the yard and pick blackberries off the vine, or to comment on the blueness of the sky or the way the buds looked on the tree, and I think of her Kilpatrick family on their Midwestern homestead and know that her parents and grandparents were much the same. And when I walk through a sunny day with clouds like the wind made visible and my mind is at ease and my spirit is content, I think of my roots and know that the nature my ancestors nurtured and made grow is something that I can love, too, and that connects me to those who came before.

The image is of John and Jane Kilpatrick.

Posted by Aaron on March 9, 2008 9:39 PM