Most of the
time, the living leave the dead alone. We might take a walk in a beautiful
cemetery such as Mt. Hope. Or we might wave a little flag on Memorial Day.
Elvis imitators resurrect The King for fun and profit. At a Spiritualist church
you might find the dead speaking through a glassy eyed medium. And we pass
countless pictures of dead presidents back and forth all day.
But there’s a smaller slice of the
population who have a different relationship with the dead. They want
knowledge, understanding, truth.
And so they go digging in paper
graveyards. Death certificates, census reports, cemetery records, city
directories, wills, and newspaper birth announcements. Here, a trace of the
truth can be found.
“As long as there’s more information out there, I’ll keep working,” says Richard
Squires. “I love research. Every little thing I find, that’s the payoff. That’s
the reward.”
Squires, a librarian at Monroe
Community College, has spent endless hours doing genealogical research. What’s
interesting about his work, however, is that he’s focused on someone else’s
family. His book, Stern Fathers Under the
Mould, is an in-depth study of the Lovecraft family in Rochester.
H.P. Lovecraft was one of America’s
most important horror writers. His Chthulhu Mythos stories have spawned endless
imitations, movies, websites, cultic devotion, and scholarly researches. But
until Squires had done his work, there was no solid study of Lovecraft’s
ancestors in Rochester.
Squires was a fan of Lovecraft and
his tales of madness and ancient dread. But he also saw real value in
uncovering facts about more ordinary people. “As I began to uncover the bits
and pieces of data, a feeling of resentment stirred within me,” he says. “I was
beginning to resent the way in which HPL had trivialized these Rochester
Lovecrafts.”
Though ordinary folks, they
experienced real drama and significance in the everyday workings of their
lives.
“I used to think of it as a puzzle,”
Squires says. “But a puzzle is completed. A painting might never be finished.
It’s one more brush stroke on the canvas. Now we have a picture we can look at.
Every little piece is another brush stroke.”
In the course of his research,
Squires met with many people who had only a passing understanding that a member
of their family had such legendary status.
“I was amazed at their openness,”
Squires says. “They opened up family stories for me. They showed me marriage
certificates, photo albums, and a family Bible.
“What I wanted to do was to piece
together a social history of the family, to make each name on the genealogical
charts connect with a once-living and breathing entity,” he says. “I wanted to
put some flesh on the bones.”
The largest genealogical archive on the planet is maintained by The Latter Days
Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church. The collection in Salt Lake
City contains more than a billion rolls of microfilm, almost a million
microfiches, and 300,000 books and serials. There are also smaller archives
around the country, two in Monroe County.
Betty Hales, director the Brockport
Family History Center, explains why the LDS church has for over 100 years
researched millions of genealogical records: “We’ve learned through revelation
that we can be together forever,” she says. “We do family history because we
believe that families can be together forever. A man and woman can be married
for time and all eternity.”
Hales, whose mother never joined the
LDS Church on earth, has been bonded to her family in a postmortem ritual
called a “sealing.”
“My daughter-in-law in Australia was
baptized in proxy for my mother,” she says. “Kind of like when you buy a house,
the real-estate agent stands in proxy for you at the legal proceedings.”
But this ritual does not guarantee
Hale’s mother a place in the Celestial Kingdom. “Baptism is the door, the
entry,” she says. People still might refuse to join their families in the next
world. “They have the choice on the other side.”
But these ancestors can only be
“sealed” to the body of believers if they are identified by name. In the next
world, Hales says, the dead will have another chance to join the Mormon church.
“I picture the afterlife as a place where you can be together sharing what you
know, basically being missionaries, teaching those who’ve died.”
“God will create a place for us
where we’ll dwell with Him,” says Paul Toner, director of the LDS Family
History Center on Westfall Road. “A literal place, a perfected world.
Individuals will look like Him, have His powers and attributes, but still be
subject to Him.”
This interplanetary aspect of LDS
belief is not talked about much, but it’s essential to Mormon notions of the
afterlife. The Prophet Joseph Smith has revealed to Mormons that if you went
looking for God, you’d best start with the Planet Kolob, which is, according to
Toner, “the planet nearest to where God dwells. It’s the first world which God
created.”
God’s nature also differs in Mormon
belief from Christian theology. “God has a glorified body,” Toner says. “Not
flesh and blood, but flesh and pure light. He has a perfected body that can not
die because it has no blood.” Unlike the nebulous, ethereal idea of God that many
folks hold, the LDS church is adamant that God, in Toner’s words, “was once a
man who dwelled on an earth like this one.” But he progressed in an upward
direction, becoming “perfected,” as individual Mormons on this earth can also.
This is not some obscure teaching,
but central to Mormon belief. Understanding your place in family history is
crucial to establishing your place in the afterlife. In the church’s own
Journal of Discourses, the Prophet Joseph Smith is quoted as saying, “You have
got to learn how to be Gods yourself… the same as all Gods have done before
you.” And the church’s top leader, Spencer W. Kimball, declared that the
faithful “may become gods. There seems to be plenty of space out there in the
universe.”
Toner says there are “worlds without
number. God’s purpose is to create worlds. He’s still in that process. And
always will be.” There’s a real optimism in LDS belief, a sense that progress
is real, in this world and the next. And for Mormons who make the right
choices, ruling a planet as God does here is a good possibility. “You can be
whatever you want to be.” In the Celestial Kingdom “everyone will be totally
and individually free.”
A 4-year-old girl named Janet Mercel died in 1929. She was my grandparents’
first daughter. And though her life was short, she casts a long shadow over my
family. Digging ore from my own genealogical mother lode, finding and reading
Janet’s death certificate, has helped me understand who I am and where I came
from.
I own two photos of Janet. In one
she looks back at the camera beautifully alive though not a beautiful child.
Big green eyes like her sister (my mother), short cropped hair, pudgy hands, a
wisp of a smile. There’s inquiry in her eyes, a childish questioning. She was
speaking by then, age four, listening, sitting in church and hearing the hymns.
She asks a question, or perhaps I ask it for her, singing these words I found
in my grandparents’ Methodist hymnal:
And am I born to die, to lay this
body down
And must my trembling spirit fly,
into a world unknown?
The other picture of Janet is from
her wake, a few months later. It shows a small white coffin in the living room
on May Street, near Mt. Hope Cemetery. Mountains of roses and lilies, baskets
and wreathes and vases. The entire foreground, the floor, and every horizontal
surface is filled with flowers. Behind the coffin a small palm tree arches.
Janet’s face, rigid in death, is hard to find in the hothouse profusion. It’s
the same face as the other photo, the same pudgy little hands, but stiff and
waxy like carved soap. A 4-year-old dead because the doctor could do nothing to
treat meningitis. No sulfa antibiotics, no penicillin.
So my mother was born only a year
later, a replacement for Janet, and was, according to my grandfather, “the most
wanted child in the world.”
That little dead girl now reaches
her hand out seven decades later and holds me by the throat. Her illness, her
death, transformed my mother’s family. Fear of disease loomed over the Mercel
household. The world became, in the course of a week, a place of unseen danger.
Meningitis consumes the body in days. One Sunday, your little girl is playing
in the lawn and the next she’s lost, laid deep in coffin earth.
Similarly, my paternal grandfather
was killed by pneumonia, before there was effective treatment for it. Agents of
disease, viruses, and bacteria haunt my past. Infections loom like ghosts,
ready to drag us to the next world.
And when I add the facts of Janet’s
death to the image of her father (a few short months after the stock market
crash) going door to door around Rochester, looking desperately for any kind of
work, a picture emerges that helps explain a great deal about my own character.
I grew up knowing that the world was
not a safe place. Fear loomed from the past. Malign forces hovered just out of
sight. And this genealogical fact, not uncovered until I was in my 40s, has
helped me make sense of who I am, and why.
There’s no one left who knew Janet
in the flesh. I take care of her grave in Mount Hope. I hold the photos. Even
to me, though, she’s a phantom.
Michael Meggison has also spent much time working his way backward through his
family’s history. No deep secrets have been revealed. There’s been no great
transformation in how he understands himself or his background. Still, for the
last two decades, genealogy has been one of his great passions. And for the
last two years, it has been part of his professional life as well.
As a child, he moved with his
immediate family from Long Island to Livonia. Cut off from his grandparents,
cousins, aunts, and uncles, he felt isolated in his new home. “I was envious,”
he says, of the people around him who had close connections to their extended
families. “I was without any kin to call my own. Once we moved here, we cut off
all ties, although it was not intentional.”
He began working on his family’s
history at age 18, as “a way to connect with family I had not seen or even
heard of.” Describing the fascination genealogical research has for him,
Meggison excitedly talks about “lineals and collaterals,” strangers sharing
personal stories, “living blood,” and the way certain professions are passed
down through the generations.
He spent years on this project,
finally in 2000 publishing a well-regarded book on the Meggison family called MEGGISON: The Ancestors and Descendants of
Capt. George Eden Meggison (1756-1815).
Since then, he’s branched out into
other major genealogical projects with a Rochester focus. One of them concerns
the ancestors of George W. Bush. Three generations of this dynasty lived in our
area. When asked why a politician’s distant ancestors are significant, Meggison
explains, “The Bush family was pretty nomadic. More generations of the family
situated in this area than any other place they lived.” George W’s
great-great-great-grandfather Timothy lived on King Street, and his descendants
occupied the still-standing house until 1959. In fact, some of George W’s
ancestors are buried near here. Timothy Bush’s grave can be found in Oakfield
Cemetery in Penfield.
Meggison talks about “civic pride,”
when explaining his interest in genealogy. But it seems that something deeper
than Rochester boosterism is at work. Creating his own family tree was like
having a “big family reunion. All these ancestors were there in spirit, if not
in person.” There’s a real satisfaction in mastering mountains of facts,
linking the generations, making sense of seemingly random data.
Meggison admits that his research
“took a lot of my social life.” Though it sometimes is a family project,
usually genealogy “can be pretty solitary.” When he was younger, he kept his
fascinations pretty well under wraps. “Genealogy is often associated with old
ladies and eccentrics.”
Now in this 30s, Meggison has “come
out,” as he puts it. Beside his day job at Paychex, he now performs
genealogical work as a professional, doing the fine-grain research necessary to
connect people with their pasts. “It’s like discovering uranium every time I
find the link they were looking for.”
Yes, the living often seem more
important than the dead. But the links between past and present, those who’ve
gone before and those still here, are far more significant than we usually
admit. Or, as Meggison puts it, “There’s more than just us.”
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 6, 2004.
