Every human has a family saga which may or may not be known depending on how much our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles are willing to share with us. Tracking down my own history has been rather difficult given that my father died when I was only eight, a time before I had even thought to question him about his ancestors. My mother was mostly tight lipped, given to very little discussion about her life as a child or the stories of her mother and father. I have been forced to piece together an incomplete puzzle with many missing pieces and even contradictions. I have only been able to trace the long lineage of my grandmother Minnie Bell Smith. Knowledge of every other grandparent ends with mostly questions.
There are those who see little value in tracking down the names of the people whose lives trickled down to the moment of our own births. They seem to think that knowing our origins does nothing to change who we actually are, but I am of a mind that those names from the past provide us with important knowledge about ourselves. Through them we are able to follow the amazing journey of our little branch of humankind.
Perhaps the most stunning absence of information comes from my paternal grandfather, the ultimate storyteller who inspired me to record my own tales of living. Even he was somewhat uncertain about just how he came to be. All he knew was that his mother died within days of giving birth to him. He thought her name was Marion Rourke, but I have been unable to find any evidence that she even existed. His father was James Mack, a man who was seemingly overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising a child alone. His response to the tragedy was to take his infant son to a woman named Sarah Reynolds whom my grandfather knew as his grandmother.
None of these people show up in official records even though they presumably were living somewhere in either North Carolina or Virginia. Their connections with each other are not to be found in marriage licenses, birth records, or even census documents. It is as though all of them were flying under the radar, ciphers in their own presence. Years of research and DNA testing have yielded nothing to verify that my grandfather even had parents or grandparents, but of course he must have had ancestors like the rest of us.
Grandpa told me that his beloved grandmother died when he was thirteen. Since he was a minor he had to have a guardian to administer the small inheritance that his grandmother left him. At court the judge allowed him to choose the person that he wanted to guide him into adulthood. Given his lack of contact with his birth father for most of his life, he asked the judge to name an uncle named John Little to be his official guardian.
John Little was an honorable man according to Grandpa. He had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and my grandfather so admired him that he ultimately changed his own name from Mack to Little. He kept his father’s name as his middle name which became a nickname among his friends and coworkers who often referred to him as Mack.
I have found John Little and know who his family was. I can trace his ancestry far back in time, but I have never been able to find any kind of connection between him and my grandfather. I even tried contacting John Little’s descendants to find out it any of them knew how he was an uncle to my Grandpa.
Unfortunately John Little died in Puerto Rico. A deadly hurricane had devastated the island country in 1900, and Captain Little was sent to help in the aftermath. While there he contracted typhus and died leaving a young wife and an infant daughter. It is likely that his early demise left much to be learned about his own story, leaving his descendants to wonder why I seemed to think that he was somehow one of my ancestors as well.
We humans have a desire to know who we are, how our stories began. I can follow a thread all the way back to Norwegian Vikings in my Grandmother Minnie Bell’s line. I at least know who my Slovakian great great and great great great grandparents were even though I never had an opportunity to quiz my grandparents about their lives before boarding steamships and traveling to Galveston, Texas where their life in America began.
Three fourths of who I am is hidden in the mists of history, but I have a determination to somehow solve the mystery. I am connected to my ancestors by threads that seem broken, but surely there is a knot somewhere that will lead me back along the journey that those people took. Somehow I feel them calling to me, wanting me to know them even in very small ways. I know that they matter. I believe that they want me to know them so that I might be the voice of their stories. Somewhere out there are the answers.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 