We are interested in knowing the significance of historical events in your family history, and so are offering this counterfactual poll. The results will be included in an upcoming issue of Ancestry Magazine.

Read some of the considerations below and then take the poll here.

1. Though popular history claims Sir Alexander Fleming was the first to discover the Penicillium mold from which penicillin is made (in 1928), in fact it was discovered more than 50 years earlier by British scientist, John Tyndall. Nothing much came of Tyndall’s discovery and so the world would have to wait until 1942 for a drug to be developed into a form that could effectively treat bacterial infection. If work to convert Penicillium into a usable anti-bacterial treatment had begun with Tyndall in 1875, penicillin may have been saving lives in the last years of the 19th century. That means it would have been available for wounded soldiers in World War I, to treat diseases such as pneumonia, and for a variety of other life-saving tasks.

2. When talks began about a transcontinental railroad in America, two main routes were suggested: the central route, which is what was ultimately built, and a southern route, which ran through Texas, avoiding the Rocky Mountains. The main benefit of this route is that it would avoid the snow and inclement weather of its central counterpart. The United States even purchased land in what is now Arizona and New Mexico to facilitate the route. A variety of political issues, many involving the Civil War and the benefit this railroad would be to the South, influenced the decision to build along the central route.

3. Though President Wilson vetoed this immigration act multiple times (as did several presidents before him), Congress overrode him and it went into effect in May of 1917. Among a variety of things, this act prevented many Asians and Pacific Islanders from entering the country, as well as anyone over the age of 16 who was illiterate. The exclusion list also included idiots, alcoholics, prostitutes, polygamists, and others.

4. The bill, which was passed in 1944, helped thousands of veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam go to college, buy houses, and get jobs For a variety of reasons, mostly disagreements about how exactly it should function, it almost did not pass.

We’d love to read your comments and see what events in history had the greatest impact on your family.

A matryoshka doll is a brightly painted wooden figurine that can be taken apart to reveal successively smaller dolls nesting inside one another. It’s also known as a Russian nesting doll. Believe it or not, there is a matryoshka doll of sorts in this photo. Can you find it?

The photograph was sent to us by Sue Edminster, who explained that the man in the picture was her greatgrandfather W. A. Walker. She asked us to date it.

What you’re looking for isn’t an actual matryoshka doll, but the photographic equivalent of one. The photograph contains a clue that contains another smaller clue that contains an even smaller clue. Now do you see it?

The largest clue is the reed organ, once an important domestic instrument. A reed organ offered a cheap alternative to the ever-popular family piano, while at the same time providing a suitable instrument for accompanying family hymns on a Sunday. Hundreds of thousands of organs were sold during the instrument’s peak in popularity in the late 19th century. Today reed organs are the province of collectors and museums.

Identifying the brand of the organ and researching the time period it was available would typically have been the first step to dating the picture, but we noticed a smaller clue associated with it that got our attention. Do you know what it is?

The second clue we found was the theme of the sheet music on the organ. The title is “The Battle of Manila,” and it was composed by Eduard Holst. We found a copy of the sheet music on the website . The picture was taken sometime after the Battle of Manila took place in May 1898.

But wait. There’s more. When we researched the sheet music, we found a third, smaller clue that we thought was even more definitive.

While the sheet music could have been printed any time after the Battle of Manila occurred, the first page of the music shows the copyright date as MDCCCXCVIII, or 1898. The sheet music must have been published between May and December 1898.

The theme of the music—the Battle of Manila—was most likely current at the time the picture was taken. Presumably, the lifetime of such topical publications was not too long. The picture was probably taken between May 1898 and late 1899.

Australia—Convict Savings Bank Books, 1824–1886
New York Emigrant Savings Bank, 1850–1883
Maryland Calendar of Wills
New York City Wills, 1665–1707
New York City Wills, 1771–1776
Early California Wills
Muster and Pay Rolls of the War of the Revolution
History of Taxation in Connecticut, 1636–1776
A Century of Banking in New York, 1822–1922
Men and Money: The Urban Frontier at Green Bay, 1815–1840
The Rich Men of Massachusetts
The Wealthy Men and Women of Brooklyn and Williamsburgh
Where to Emigrate and Why: Homes and Fortunes in the Boundless
West and the Sunny South

So who would know? An heir tracer—a genealogist assigned to a find out just who is entitled to an unclaimed estate.

“When an estate goes into probate with no designated administrator it will eventually go to the state,” says ProGenealogists Inc.’s Kory Meyerink. Oftentimes, a genealogist is hired, usually by an independent heir-tracing firm, to determine who the estate’s beneficiary would be.

Heir research, closely related to forensic genealogy, usually involves two parts: locating unknown or missing heirs and analyzing information for court, says Kathleen Hinckley, a certified genealogist and private investigator.

Researching heirs is a competitive field, one that Hinckley says isn’t easy to just step into. And it’s hard work. A researcher needs to develop worldwide contacts and a library of resources. Even the silver lining of telling someone he or she is about to inherit a bundle has a cloud: indirectly telling someone a relative has died.

So what do you do when someone tells you that you may be the heir to a fortune?
Hinckley recommends starting by verifying that the claim is legitimate. Ask for references. Then do a little of your own research: check with professional organizations like the Association of Professional

Genealogists or the Board for Certification of Professional Genealogists to see if you can find information about the people who found you. And remember, a simple Google search—for more information about the estate, the researcher, or the organization contacting you about the claim—can always be enlightening.

My father-in-law, Thomas F. Reid, was a 26-year-old captain in 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (“The Old Guard”) in Ft. Myer, Virginia on 22 November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As captain of D Company, Tom was assigned the responsibility of organizing all of the details of the interment ceremonies (arranging for the Eternal Flame, the Irish Guard, dignitaries, etc.) at Arlington National Cemetery three days later.

Tom, now 70 years old, has decided to set down his recollections of those four days in writing and to collect testimonials from various surviving officers and ceremonial participants. So far, he’s tracked down about half a dozen of them, including the bugler, handler of the caparisoned horse, a pall bearer, and others.

One of those participants, Sgt. James R. (“Pete”) Holder, contributed an audiotape of his memoirs, including, among other things, a long testimonial about his hero and mentor, Capt. Michael D. Groves, the company commander of Honor Guard Company. Tom wants to track down Groves’s children because he thinks they would appreciate hearing this wonderful testimonial about their dad, a man whose reputation has been otherwise assaulted by attempts to link him to “the JFK conspiracy.”

This is what we know of Michael and his family, largely from obituaries:

Michael D. Groves was born 19 August 1936 in Birmingham (but some say Ann Arbor), Michigan. He went to Birmingham High School and then Eastern Michigan University
(1959) as an ROTC honor graduate, entering the service immediately upon graduation. He was said to be a close friend of JFK and occasionally babysat for John Jr.

As company commander of the Honor Guard Company, Groves directed military honors at JFK’s funeral on 25 November 1963. A week later, he died of a sudden heart attack (or some say poison) at the dinner table at his home in Arlington, Virginia.

He was reportedly survived by a daughter, Kelly Ann (3 years old), and his wife, Mary, who at that time was eight months pregnant with another child. Tom believes Mary was about 25 when her husband died and that she later remarried. Capt. “Mike” Groves was also survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Groves of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

So the orphan heirloom in this case was an audio tape with information about a man whose older child had hardly known him and whose younger child had never known him. As an Army brat myself, whose father had also entered the Army out of ROTC in the late 1950s—not to mention, whose family still has the newspaper from the day Kennedy was assassinated—this family felt familiar to me. I wanted to see what I could do.

Where to Start?
Because I spend as much time finding the living as I do finding the dearly departed, I knew this case was far from a slam dunk. Factors such as privacy laws and the mobility of our population can make locating the living more daunting than picking up the trail of a long-departed ancestor.

In this case, we were dealing with a military family, which amplified the difficulty. Where was the soldier’s wife from? Mike and Mary could have met anywhere—he might have been stationed and married in any of a number of places. And if Mary had remarried, what surname might she and her children have wound up with?

I decided to practice one of my own guidelines for such cases—that is, to not obsess on the people I was seeking (Mary, Kelly Ann, and the unknown child), but to find people associated with them and work my way closer.

Bob was smart to provide as much detail as he had because one tidbit caught my eye—the fact that Mike’s parents had lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

In Praise of Cuyahoga County
I’ve worked countless cases across the country, so I often have a sense of which locations are genealogy friendly, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio—where Cleveland Heights is located—is one of them. Since I’m too lazy to memorize or bookmark every single resource I use, I turned to one of my perennial favorites: <www.deathindexes.com>. I selected “Ohio” and then “Cuyahoga County,” and there it was—the Cleveland Necrology Index, hosted by the Cleveland Public Library. I figured that if Mike’s parents were from that area, I might be able to turn up an obituary or two that mentioned them, so I searched “Donald Groves.” I hadn’t expected what popped up:

Source: Plain Dealer; Cleveland Necrology File, Reel 114.
Notes: Heights Army Captain Dies at Fort Myers. A young Army captain who commanded the ceremonial troops at President Kennedy’s funeral collapsed and died while eating dinner at his home at Fort Myers, Virginia, last night. The officer, Capt. Michael D. Groves, 27, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Groves, who until last month lived at 2291 S. Overlook Road, Cleveland Heights. They moved to Birmingham, Mich., where Capt. Groves grew up. A sister, Darby, still lives at the Cleveland Heights address. He also is survived by his wife, Mary Frances, and a 3-year-old daughter. He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his sister said.

Where’d They Go?
This was a tremendous discovery to make so early in the search. I now knew that Mike had a sister and that his parents had returned to Birmingham, Michigan, where the soldier had grown up. I was delighted, too, that his sister was named Darby because distinctive names can often be a little easier to trace.

Since Cuyahoga County does have such handy online resources, I played with them for a while, trying to surface any other references to Darby, but no luck. Nor could I find any references to Mike or his parents. Odd. Even though it had been decades ago, I had expected to pick up a snippet or two.

So I decided to shift gears and focus on Birmingham, Michigan. Sure enough, I easily found the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) entry for his father, Donald W. Groves. He had died in 1993, but what about his wife, the soldier’s mother? I turned to a fee-based site, <www.privateeye.com>, to search for Donald because many people continue to be listed for a decade or so after they’ve passed away—especially husbands whose wives keep the phone listed in the deceased’s name. Yes, there was Donald, and since others associated with the same address are also listed, I now knew that Mike’s mother’s name was Gladys. I returned to the SSDI hoping to come up empty, but there she was in 1994. I explored a bit more and <www.findagrave.com> revealed that Donald and Gladys had been buried in Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan, but none of the other Groves in the cemetery were useful for the purposes of this research.

What Happened to Darby?
Sadly, neither of the soldier’s parents was with us any longer, so I turned my attention back to his sister, Darby, but how could I possibly find her? Since the parents had died just slightly more than a decade ago, I tried a variety of online newspaper resources (including ones local to the Birmingham area) but found nothing. This meant it was time to go back to basics.

I pulled up <www.epodunk.com>, entered Birmingham, and scrolled down to “libraries.” A minute later, I left a message with the Adult Services Department of the Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham. Much to my delight, a woman named Susan called back a short while later. I provided details about Mike’s parents, and the following morning Susan faxed me both of their obituaries—the genealogical equivalent of gold. (Note: Always be kind to librarians and overly generous with libraries.)

I read Donald’s first, and though it told me quite a bit about him, the only survivors listed were his wife and three grandchildren. Uh-oh. What about Darby? Why wasn’t she listed? Three grandchildren—so Kelly, Kelly’s unknown sibling, and, presumably, a child of Darby’s.

Okay, time to turn to the obituary for Gladys—ah, she was the mother of the late Michael and Darbea, not Darby.

And Darbea had predeceased her parents. How sad. But the obituary went on to state that Gladys was survived by her mother. This was good news. The obituary listed the names of four of her siblings. And, finally, the names of her grandchildren: Kelly, Kimberly, and Daryl. Almost an ideal obituary.

I reasoned that Kimberly was probably the child born shortly after Mike’s death and that Daryl was Darbea’s son. The obituary also included Darbea’s married name (which I’m excluding here in the interest of privacy), so I decided to search the SSDI for her, but there was no such person. Huh? I turned again to <www.privateeye.com>, this time looking for her son, Daryl—and there, with the others associated with his address, was my answer. Darbea was her middle name. So I returned to the SSDI, entering what I now knew to be her first and last names, and there she was. She died in 1978. Again, I considered how difficult it must have been for Donald and Gladys to lose both of their children so young, Mike at age 27 and Darbea at 37. It made me want to find Kelly and Kimberly all the more.

On a hunch, I returned to <www.findagrave.com> to search for those with Darbea’s surname buried at the same cemetery as her parents. Imagine my reaction when I spotted not only her entry, but Daryl’s. Daryl, it turned out, had died a few years after his grandparents. This not only saddened me but also made me wonder whether I would be able to locate Kelly and Kimberly. If their only aunt, cousin, and their grandparents on their father’s side had all passed away, who would know what happened to them?

Daryl and Gladys Point the Way
I decided to search for an obituary for Daryl and found it at <www.genealogybank.com>. It confirmed that Darbea had been his mother; it also confirmed his father’s name, which I had spotted earlier when searching PrivateEye. So this was one potential contact—the soldier’s brother-inlaw—but given that his wife had died decades ago, would he still be in touch with Kelly and Kimberly?

I turned to the detailed-laden obituary for Gladys. Following up the clues provided, I discovered that her mother had passed away several years later at age 99. GenealogyBank also popped up her obituary, so I was able to backtrack to the family’s 1930 census entry and get an estimated year of birth for each of Gladys’s siblings. I soon discovered that one of them had also subsequently passed away, but with rough birth dates; the others were easy to pinpoint.

I didn’t feel that I should actually call anyone in the family, so I turned the contact information back to Wholly Genes’s Bob Velke and hoped that someone would know something. The next day, Bob reported back that he had talked to everyone whose information I had sent him and a few others. There were a few avid genealogists in the family, so he bounced around from person to person, but in the end it was Mike’s brother-in-law who solved the mystery. Mary had remarried to a Johnson—now how many Mary Johnson’s could there be? “Oh, by the way,” he asked Bob, “Do you want her phone number?” Bob’s response, according to an e-mail he sent relaying the conversation, was, “Pfft, yeah.” A short while later, Bob was talking to the soldier’s remarried widow, who had just returned from dinner with her daughter Kim. The time
from Bob’s initial phone call to me to his talk with Mary?Approximately 48 hours.

Who’s Next?
Do you have an orphan heirloom in need of rescuing? If so, go to <www.honoringourancestors.com>, click on the Submissions menu, and select Orphan Heirlooms. Just fill out the short form and hit the “send” button. Who knows? Maybe yours will be the next success story.

The mystery photo was a picture of three older men and one woman and had been taken in Norway. Aunt Bertye was quite sure one gruff-looking man was her grandfather, Torkel Gulliksen; she thought the woman might be her grandmother, Dorthea. The two men in the back were anyone’s guess. The individuals remained unidentified for about 20 years.

I knew that Torkel, Dorthea, and their children had immigrated to the U.S. in 1882. However, Torkel and Dorthea never made the transition to American life and returned to Norway in 1896, leaving their children in the States. Bertye remembered fondly that they gave a doll to each of their grandchildren before leaving. Sometime before 1913, Torkel died in Norway and Dorthea returned to America to be with her children.

Still, I wanted to know more and I’d always hoped to connect with distant cousins, so in 2002 I posted a message on RootsWeb mentioning that I was researching Torkel’s family in Norway. It took two years, but eventually I received an e-mail from a Danish man named Lars. He was a descendant of one of Torkel’s brothers.

I e-mailed a copy of my mystery photo to Lars, thinking he might find it interesting. I was amazed when he e-mailed back a copy of the exact same photo, although, as he pointed out, the corners on his weren’t bent.

Who did Lars think the people in the photo were? We agreed on Torkel. But according to Lars, who had sent me a fantastic photograph of Torkel and Dorthea that proved the woman in the mystery photo couldn’t be Dorthea, the woman was actually Torkel’s youngest sister, Sofie.

As for the men in the back, Lars had other photos of one of them, but without labels. All he knew was that his photos were taken in Holmstrand, Norway. I searched for more information on Torkel’s siblings. Through census and church records available through the Norwegian Digital Archives, I learned that one brother, Christian, had moved to Holmstrand.

Lars identified the last man as another brother, Gunder. Interestingly enough, I learned that Gunder immigrated to the U.S. in 1871, and I found in the Minnesota Historical Society death index that he died in Minnesota in 1920.

Had Gunder gone back to Norway for a visit? A check of New York passenger lists revealed that Gunder Nygaard, 63, of Canby, Minnesota, arrived in New York City on 18 September 1906 on the ship Hellig Olav after visiting Norway. As far as I can determine, this was the only time he went back.

With all of this information, Lars and I dated the mystery photo to approximately 1906. From church records, I learned that Torkel and Christian died within three years of the time this photo was taken.

I also discovered something else: this mystery photo, which I originally had little hope of ever identifying, was a record of the final reunion of siblings who had been separated for decades.

At least, that’s what some Joe Schmoe wrote on his passport application in 1892.

Actually, that Joe Schmoe’s name is Horatio Pickett, and he also said my grandfather had a large nose. His description for my great-great-grandfather’s face? Common.

C’mon, Horatio. Now you’re just asking for it.

I found all this in the U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925 collection on Ancestry.com. I have to wonder where they find this stuff. That’s good. Census records I would have thought of. Yearbooks? Maybe. Passport applications? Never. Seems like if my ancestor signed it, they’ll find it. When the collection went live there was a buzz in the office. Juliana, our editor for the Ancestry Weekly Journal, was first to check it. She found several relatives.

“Juliana always finds someone!” my coworker quipped, logging onto the site. “Must be ‘cuz her ancestors were wealthy. They could afford to travel.” We give each other the our-ancestors-were-paupers grin of camaraderie and feel better.

“Oh my word. There’s my grandfather,” she says suddenly.

I had spent the previous morning searching the collection for my own relatives and found an application for my great-great-grandfather, Harmon Hafen, within ten minutes. I was feeling pretty satisfied about that one.

“Is there a photo?” I asked, secretly hoping there wasn’t. There had been no photo for Harmon. Just a plain old application—saying he had a common face, a large nose, and a medium mouth. Whatever that meant. Oh yeah. And he was 5’8″. One inch shorter than I am. Huh.

“Yeah. Yeah. There’s a photo. There he is. That’s him.”

“No way. You always get the photos!” She was walking back from the good printer waving a nice 11 x 17-inch printout of his application, with a photo that—sure enough—looked exactly like he could be her grandfather. Same Danish features.

“It says he has a scar on his neck,” she said. “I didn’t know that. And he was naturalized in Washington. That explains why I could never find his naturalization papers before. He did them while he was out-of-state—in the army.”

That is neat. I can’t begrudge her that—even though I feel a little bit like I just lost the lottery.

“Oh sure. Miss Poster Child for Ancestry Success Stories,” another coworker chimes in on her way out for a noontime stroll. She can’t get further on her line than her grandparents.

I continue to be amazed by the breadth of collections Ancestry posts for us to do more sleuthing in. And I continue to be amazed that—despite what I think are impossible odds—at least one of my ancestors always seems to show up in even the most obscure collections.

Minus the photo.

__________________________

Jana Lloyd is editor of the Ancestry Monthly newsletter. She can be reached at AMUeditor@ancestry.com but cannot assist with personal research questions.

*Passports became common in the 1840s, but were not required until after World War I. The U.S. Passport Applications Collection contains more than 2 million passport applications filed by residents of the U.S. Of those, around 300,000 contain photographs of the applicant. Information can include date and place of birth, residence, naturalization, and other biographical information. To search the U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925, go here.

This story is about one of my heartstring relatives and the remarkable journey on which he called me. He wasn’t even a “real” relative. He was the husband of our greatgrandmother for only a short while in a marriage doomed by a perfect storm of personal and world conditions (“Emma’s Unmarked Rest,” September/October 2007). We’ll call him Adam because he really could be any man. And this story is not so much about him as it is about discovering the irreplaceable sense of being there that comes as you reconstruct the lives of your ancestors in settings afar and centuries previous.

For a long time Adam was only a sidebar to me, a smallish piece of the puzzle that was our great-grandmother’s life. I became increasingly drawn to him as the facts unfolded and his story proved compellingly sad and mysterious. His brief marriage to our great-grandmother was plagued by numerous miscarriages and the death of a child, ending with her commitment to a state hospital in the midst of World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, and a crippling drought. Adam sold their farm and seemed to vanish. She recovered, remained in the area, went on. He, on the other hand, eluded every attempt I made to locate him, maddeningly missing from U.S. censuses; death records; marriage, divorce, or probate records; city directories; newspaper searches. Finally, through the slender thread of a 90-year-old life insurance policy, he let me know where he was. He had left a forwarding address in Edmonton, Alberta. From there it was only a few clicks to the Edmonton Cemeteries database, where I found him, his grave unmarked—just like his daughter Emma’s. An obituary in the Edmonton Journal confirmed that I had the right man. He had never married again, left no survivors save two distant sisters.

Take Off
From the outset, my husband had a sixth sense about where this story would take me. He believed there was no substitute for “walking the land” and that if I wanted to truly know these ancestors, I had to go to where they had lived. It was that belief that had brought me to the potter’s field in Montana where Adam’s baby daughter Emma was buried, and now it would lead me to Edmonton.

I started laying the groundwork, a round of phone calls to the cemetery, to the library, to the historical society, to a realtor who had homes listed in the neighborhood where I had found Adam’s address in the old Henderson’s city directories. And an extraordinary thing began happening. Everywhere I “went,” before I even got there, people warmed to my story and bent over backwards to help. The cemetery administrator e-mailed digital photographs of Adam’s gravesite. The realtor did the same for Adam’s two homes. The library sent obituaries and city directory information and urged me to come dig further in person. At the historical society, I was invited to tour their renovation project and stay for lunch.

It was a short fall: I was in love with Edmonton before I even arrived. What can you say when you land in a place you’ve never been and it feels like home? My week in Edmonton unfolded as if I were expected company. In a way, I was.

At the cemetery, the administrator unscrewed the binding of a huge old book, half her size, to copy records for me. She requisitioned further records from a vault at a remote location. “It’ll cost,” she told me, “but we’ll cover it for you.” At the historical society, several folks gave me hours of their time, a fascinating, detailed walking tour of a vibrant old neighborhood, and century-old stories to go along. The realtor knew the current owner of Adam’s home and offered to try to get me in.

At the Edmonton City Archives, a building-within-a-building ensconced, appropriately, in the historic Prince of Wales Armory, the staff apologized repeatedly for the sweltering heat, even as I kept them running on multiple trips back and forth for voter records and maps and local histories (“That’s our job!”). The receptionist approached me at the end of the day with brochures for several local history events happening that week that she thought might interest me. She wanted to be sure I enjoyed my time in Edmonton. She told me she had vacationed at the Oregon coast not far from where I live and loved it. We shared that little bond.

At the Edmonton Public Library, I met reference specialist Lyn Meehan, a rare hybrid: a library professional who is also—and perhaps, first—a life-long genealogist. Lyn confirmed that I had done the right thing, coming to the source.

“You have to hold that piece of paper in your hand,” she says. “People rely too heavily on the Internet. The Internet is merely a starting point for the genealogist. Even the best databases have a 10 percent error rate. Surnames and given names can be misspelled or transcribed incorrectly, pages may be missing. That missing page may be the one that contains the most important piece of information. That’s why I always encourage people to go back to the way we did genealogy 30 years ago—going to the point of origin. Go to the courthouse, archive, or repository and look for that original birth, marriage, or death certificate; mortgage; land deed; probate; letters of administration for intestate individuals. And even if you can find it online, know that there can be errors. I still like to hold that original document, examine it myself, just to make sure. Is this the right one I’m looking for? Is it complete?”

Lyn was instrumental in helping me obtain Adam’s naturalization records, border crossing documents, and information about collateral friends and business associates. She sent me to the Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA) with instructions to look for court records, photos, and maps.

At the PAA, a reference archivist helped me search for a divorce record I hoped I wouldn’t find; romantic me hoped Adam and our great-grandmother hadn’t ever divorced, just lived in so-called sin with others for the rest of their lives (which, at this writing, appears may be true). When I didn’t find a divorce record, the librarian was just as pleased as I was, saying, “It’s not very often I get to help someone who is happy to not find something they’re looking for.” Minutes later, my fingers came to rest on the actual handwritten entry recording his death. Paradoxically, it made him all the more alive and real to me.

And when, in the last moment before I had to leave for the airport, I found—in an archive of more than 2 million photos—a photo of the home in which Adam passed away, the same archivist hastily waived the photocopying charges and wrote up my order for a print. She sent me off with PAA pencils and notepads. After I got back home, the archive’s business manager called twice to make sure they got my order right.

Lucky Ones
Everyone I encountered in Edmonton went far beyond the assistance I asked for. They clearly cared about their city’s heritage and the part I play in it, however small. Those kind of connections, forged across distance and time, can never be had with a mere click of a mouse.

I made friends with a woodchuck along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River one beautiful mauve evening. Meandering my way through many blocks of the neighborhood in which Adam lived for most of his time in Edmonton, spending part of a morning watching children play in the park two blocks from his house, sitting against a tree next to his grave in a woodsy old part of the cemetery (for as long as I could until the little black flies got me)—I walked many of those proverbial miles in his shoes. He chose Edmonton at midlife, for reasons we have yet to discover. I like to think that in my short time there, interacting with the people and the landscape, I could begin to understand why.

Which is why, on the morning I had to leave, I said smiling-through-a-few-tears words of thanks to Adam for leading me to an unforgettable place I would never have experienced otherwise.

Lyn Meehan understands how profound that sense of place can be. “Standing where your ancestors stood, whether on the old wooden floors of your ancestor’s homestead or brownstone, the sidewalks or fields—letting your imagination run wild. … How long did it take to build the cabin? Where did they put their bed, their clothes, their provisions? What ‘trinkets’ might you find? An old implement, a stone: what might be rusted junk to someone else will find a place in your heart. Or it can be in just the pages of those old books in the archive or repository, how they’re brown, crumpled, or curled at the corners from generations of researchers turning from page to page. Sometimes people will lick their fingers and leave their thumbprint for history! It all brings an awe of that particular era. The genealogist with passion understands this. My husband jokes, ‘You have more of a relationship with those old damn dusty books than you do with me.’”

Back home, the leaves turned and more than one person inquired about my summer travels. “Didn’t you go to Hawaii?” they ask. “Yes, I admit. But let me tell you about Edmonton.”

Straight from the Heart: An Epilogue
Right about the time this story hits publication, I’ll be returning from my second trip to Edmonton. If all has gone according to plan I will have overseen the placing of a headstone on Adam’s grave—59 years to the day since his burial—and offered him a memorial dedication in place of the funeral he never had. “We offer thanks for the gift of memory, which unites life with life. Within it, loved ones transcend death and find their niche in remembrance. In the particular grace of each human being lies his immortality.”

Ellen Notbohm is a Portland, Oregon, author and columnist, a three-time ForeWord Book of the Year finalist, and a regular contributor to magazines, websites, and newsletters around the world. To contact Ellen, visit www. ellennotbohm.com.

What About Adam?
If you want to know more about Adam, well so do I. Between the day I first learned his name (misspelled in a letter from a step-relative) and the day I stood at the foot of his grave, almost four years had passed. And one of the first things I realized was, that while I had followed the story to its end, I had started in the middle. I only knew about the second half of his life. Now my journey will turn in the other direction—starting with a 19th-century Massachusetts birth record and working my way forward to the moment he said his first hello to my greatgrandmother.

I can tell you this much—Adam spent many of his years in Edmonton working for the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company, and he never married again. But these are just more facts; they’re interesting, but they do not define the essence of his life. What about his adventures and his dreams? What about regrets or fears?

Those I can’t tell you because I don’t know enough yet. In my own dreams, I sit knee-toknee with Adam in comfortable old chairs and ask a thousand questions from a list that grows longer every day—because getting an answer to one opens the door to 20 new ones.

To understand the seemingly ridiculous extremes of what we call vintage clothes today, you need to understand the evolutionary fashion changes in our own time that turned clothes we once proudly wore into items we later disdainfully discarded.

Remember the 1980s when we wore thick shoulder pads in everything we owned, even sweatshirts and tees? After the fashion reached its peak, we removed the pads, frugally hoping to update our wardrobes. We were left with sagging shoulders, sleeves too wide and too deep, and oversized tops that were suddenly too long. This led to clothes without shoulder pads, followed by jackets and tops deemed “shrunken” because they were so much smaller and shorter than before.

Fashion doesn’t just happen; it evolves. It starts with a look that everyone accepts. Experimentation by fashion leaders expands that look until its mutations reach their fullest development, at which time an opposite, new look replaces it.

This was the case in our ancestors’ time, too. In the 1840s, skirts were wide thanks to multiple scratchy-scratchy petticoats called crinolines. Hoops, wider, less scratchy, requiring fewer layers, were born in 1853. By 1867, after skirts became as wide as seemingly possible, hoops were abandoned, the excess fabric pulled back, and, voila, the bustle was born.

And each style is an example of an evolutionary change that turned old discards into the vintage clothes we cherish today.

Postscript—When the Style Is Out
What do you do when you have a closet full of suddenly outdated clothes? If an outfit is beautiful and a good example of its era, save it for posterity. Attach a note describing when and where you wore it and why you saved it. Store the outfit in acid-free tissue, a prewashed 100 percent cotton pillowslip, or a garment bag labeled “Breathable.” If an outfit simply looks tired and out of style, donate it to charity. And if an outfit looks simply ridiculous, save it for a Halloween party—you’ll get some laughs as people wax nostalgic, wondering “How could we ever have worn that?”

Our grandfather “Pappy” was notorious for labeling family members with a nickname. Some were cute and funny and some, well, were neither.

Sometime before 1986, my cousin David (a.k.a. Goliath) and I had the opportunity to sit down with Pappy and chat about these names and some other things. This was when I first heard of Squidge. The name dates back to 1918 when my newly wedded grandfather was stationed overseas, and my grandmother, Mimi, was state side, pregnant with my mother, Frances. Since there was no way for them to know the gender of the unborn child, they simply called it “Squidge.”

In 2005 my dad and I were going through old photo albums that had been hidden away for years. One of the albums belonged to Mimi and Pappy. I remember turning the page and, bang, there it was, a picture of Mom taken in June 1919. That was pretty cool in itself but the label “Squidge” made it even better. Dad knew it was a picture of Mom; I had to educate him on Squidge.

On the next page was a picture of Mom’s great-grandfather with a 7-month-old baby named Marjorie. I thought I knew most of the family members, but there was no Marjorie, although Marjorie sure looked familiar. When I asked my dad, he told me, “Oh yeah. They used to call your mother ‘Marjorie’ for a while.”

What? I’m in my mid-50s when I discover my mother, Frances/Squidge, had yet another name? And I found out that they didn’t change her name right away—the family appeared in the 1920 federal census with my mom listed as 2-year-old Marjorie.

We continued through the photo album, going a few more pages before I founnd another photo of my mother. This time Marjorie was crossed out and replaced with Frances. Ahh, peace in my universe.

But not for long—an older note on the photo states “Phyllis Chapman; 6 weeks old.” Phyllis? They also called her Phyllis? What was with these people?

Snake, Squidge’s younger sister (and my favorite aunt), explains the name changes like this: she believes her parents never dreamed their firstborn would be anything but a boy and therefore hadn’t given any thought to a girl’s name.

Now I understand why Aunt Snake was confused about what to call her big sister. And since Snake couldn’t pronounce Franny, my mother was from then on known by yet again another name: Wanny.