What Researching Dead Relatives Will Do For You

The day before our forty-second wedding anniversary, my husband, Brian, and I joked about signing on for another forty-two years. Since we’re in our sixties, we know that would be nothing short of a miracle. Every decade from now on will be a gift. We were traveling from Seattle to Lancaster, PA, for the annual conference of HOPE, a nonprofit organization that Brian has been associated with for many years. I suppose I was muling over our eventual demise when I rose from my seat on the crowded airplane to use the tiny bathroom, joining a long line of other passengers waiting in line for the flight attendants to slowly push the drink cart down the aisle. Standing there with nothing to do, I looked across at what appeared to be a sea of mostly gray-haired people sitting hunched in their seats, staring at glowing screens. The thought shot through me: where will these people be in forty years? Will they all be dead? Will they be lying in graveyards scattered across the country decomposing?

This is what researching dead relatives will do for you!

A fascination with the macabre isn’t the focus of most genealogy pursuits. The subject of death, in and of itself, is not actually morbid. Everyone dies. Genealogical researchers want to know who there relatives were before they died. How did they live? But of course, death is an aspect of our research that we can’t escape. Every one of our ancestors had one thing in common: they died.

This inevitable fact was on my mind the next day as I went for a walk in the old section of the town of Lancaster. I passed an ancient graveyard filled with stones washed clear and clean from age. Since the Steeles lived for a time in Lancaster, I wondered if any Steele names could be among the unreadable, weathered stones. But the thought of combing through hundreds of stones, many of them blank, sapped the limited cheeriness from the cloudy sky. I decided to indulge in a glass of wine and think about my dead relatives from the confines of a comfortable chair in the hotel.

Inside, I found myself, wine glass in hand, contemplating graveyards. A few months ago, Brian and I discussed where we might be buried. We could opt for the lovely cemetery at Mt. Carmel Presbyterian Church in Steeles Tavern where my ancestors have been housed for ages. I’ve never seen a lovelier graveyard. What a sweet knoll to lie upon as we look out upon the rolling hills! But then again, we’ll be dead, and probably won’t be spending much time admiring the view. (Or will we?) We have also considered burial in our local cemetery on a bluff overlooking Pugent Sound. Not bad! But we only moved here a year ago and so our roots in the community are rather shallow (and who knows if we’ll move again?). What a weird choice! What a symbol of our perpetually displaced contemporary lives! Should we be buried back in Virginia among strangers who happen to be kin to me, or near where we are living now among people we haven’t yet met?

I finished my glass of wine and packed up my computer. Later that night, I joined Brian at a social gathering for the nonprofit (HOPE) and we found ourselves talking to a man about genealogy. I’m not making this up! Apparently, a lot of people are interested in dead relatives! This particular conversation had morphed from tracing roots to modern-day burial practices even before I showed up. It turned out that our new friend, Roger, had been given the responsibility of burying his sister’s ashes, and this responsibility had presented him with a dilemma. Roger explained that his sister, who died five years ago, requested that when her two beloved dogs passed away, their ashes were to be mixed with her ashes, and then that mix of ashes—his sister’s and her two dogs—were to be scattered on a particular hill where the three of them had once loved to spend time together, the dogs running around and the sister watching the playful dogs. Roger has been waiting for the dogs to die. Old and infirm when his sister passed away, her dogs have remained tenacious and stubborn, refusing to join her in the afterlife. Now his elderly father has voiced his dying wish. He wants his daughter’s ashes to be buried with him and her mother in a special mortuary where ashes are stacked in layers—mother, daughter, father, lovingly placed on top of each other. This request from his father has presented Roger with a problem. Whose wishes should Roger respect? Who should he honor more? But then he smiles—because the telling of this anecdotal story is meant to be amusing. He explains to us that he solved the problem by deciding to mix some of his sister’s ashes with the dogs’ ashes to scatter on the beloved hillside, and then to layer the rest of her ashes between their mother and father. Presto! Now everyone will be happy!

Brian and I pondered this story when we were alone again.Perhaps we should scatter our ashes in several places? We could leave a few tidbits everywhere we’ve lived: Virginia, California, Illinois, and Washington. While we’re at it, we could scatter a few teaspoons at various sites around the globe that we’ve had the good fortune to visit: Scotland, Ireland, England, Sweden, Portugal, Japan, and China. We could force our children to go on a great adventure while scattering our bits and pieces, extending our attempt to control their lives even past the grave. Won’t they be grateful! And who knows? Maybe our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will follow the trail, trekking over the globe on a great Where’s-Waldo pilgrimage to find their grandparents’ last remains. Isn’t this a more modern and cheerier approach to prowling around cemeteries?

We are all travelers more or less; here today, gone tomorrow. I mean this in both a temporary and permanent way. Maybe that’s why so many of us become interested in genealogy as the decades loom over us. We finally realize that we are finite. What a shock! Why had this amazing revelation not occurred to us before? Our life is going to end. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Did I say researching dead relatives isn’t morbid?

Part of the reason the Steeles of Steeles Tavern fascinate me is because they stayed put for so long. My line of Steeles remained planted on the same geographical spot for over two-hundred years. Somehow that makes them seem less transitory, as though the collective generations count as one long life. How reassuring!

I also like the fact that there were so many of them. Most of the extended family of Steeles didn’t move away during the first and second generations.They remained near Steeles Tavern, surrounded by a sea of Steeles. All those cousins! All those aunts and uncles! The Steeles did their part to fill the Valley (and populate the rest of America). Siblings and their children surrounded Robert during his lifetime. Robert’s seven children provided many grandchildren for Robert in his old age. He might’ve been living in the backcountry, but Robert’s life wasn’t a lonely one.

Eventually, the Steeles fanned out across the country. (No need to focus on the names here; just follow the places.) Robert’s nephew, Robert, moved to Missouri around 1855. Robert’s nephew, Moses McClure, ended up in Kentucky. Robert’s granddaughter, Janet, migrated to Tennessee, while her sister, Sarah, moved to Kentucky, and another sister, Mary, ended up in Indiana. Nathaniel Steele III, great-nephew of Robert, moved to Indiana in 1850, and his son, Robert, continued to Kansas, with another son, John, moving to Illinois. Robert’s granddaughter, Jennie, migrated to Henderson Co, Kentucky. One of Jennie’s granddaughters later moved to Evanston, Illinois. Mary, another of Robert’s great-granddaughters, moved to Washington (where I live now) with a granddaughter, Jennie, ending up in Phoenix Arizona. A great-granddaughter, also named Jennie, moved to Carroll Co, Mississippi. Her son, Robert Weir, moved to Vaiden, Mississippi, while another son, William, became a merchant in Texas. Robert Steele’s great-grandsons, Richard and John D. Steele, were teenage boys when they left for Burton, Alabama. Another great-grandson, Annott Steele, moved to California in 1857. (His son, Henry Meade Bland became Poet Laureate of California, writing a poem about the Shenandoah Valley that he’d never visited.)

I might envy Robert and his large family with his deep geographical roots, but Robert lived through tumultuous times. His life spanned the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution. By the time of his death, peace had come to the Valley, but for most of his life, Robert faced a great deal of uncertainty and tragedy. In addition to the death of his first wife, Elizabeth, one son, David, suffered a debilitating wound during the Revolution. He also lost two sons, William and John, in a major battle against the Shawnee at Fallen Timbers.

So much for genealogy being mostly about life!

All that trauma, fear, and death had to affect him, right? I think about the tumult of his day, and wonder if the generations that followed Robert and his children continued to carry a hyper-aware fight-and-flight response in their genes. All that terrible history that came before them—the fighting on the borderlands in Scotland, the tension with the Irish Catholics as well as the English landlords in Ireland, combined with the fears they later faced in the Valley—couldn’t just disappear after a few generations, right? Each new generation must've carried some of the loss and the pain of their forefathers. So I can't help thinking: has it reached down to me?

I'm guessing it has. That's part of the big why of all this research.

Here's another question: Since many of these Valley settlers immigrated south to Tennessee and Kentucky and westward to Ohio and beyond, have the eons of their difficult experiences etched a certain personality onto all Americans?

Probably.

So this is my story—all the happenings of my dead relatives and what they have to do with me. And if you’re an American, this is your story, too. Because the Shenandoah Valley was the incubator of what it means to be an American—or at least a good chunk of our combined DNA.

The story of the Valley is our story. Mixed with other tales. As a nation, we carry the toil of the past. Look around. For better or worse, we carry our kindred with us, their heavy limbs draped across our shoulders. This is the strange aspect about discovering our dead. Even if we've moved. Even if we've tried to flee. We eventually discover that they are us, and therefore, they remain alive. Forever!

I’m on the plane returning from the East coast as I once again riffle through Aunt Mildred’s book on the Steeles of Steeles Tavern. A booklet full of dates and names needs a lot of studying to make sense of it all. (As well as good reading glasses!) As we land in Seattle, the woman next to me, seized with curiosity, finally blurts out the question she’s been wanting to ask me during the last leg of our flight. “Is that genealogy?” Her eyes are bright. She’s intrigued. Eager to hear my stories.

Really? How’s this possible? Why would anyone want to hear a stranger talk about their kin from long ago? But this happens! It’s not unusual, I promise you. I smile and tell her a shortened version of my family, how they lived for over two-hundred years in the same small town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. How my dad died and I inherited family papers I couldn’t ignore. She’s Japanese, a long way from her homeland. She’s married to an American and now lives in Seattle. I want to ask her questions. Does she miss her place of origin? Is she perpetually adrift or has she become deeply connected to her adopted land? Is two-hundred years in the same village an odd occurrence in Japan?

I also can’t help but think of the Japanese woman my father dated after World War II, during the occupation of Japan. My dad broke off this relationship because he knew he could never bring her home to the Valley. People wouldn’t forgive her for being Japanese. What would this Japanese woman sitting beside me think of this story?

As we begin to land, I decide not to ask her any questions. I might be a sleuth and a snoop and a spy, but I don’t always want to pry. I fold my papers together and fish the trash out of the mesh pocket in front of me. I look across the aisle at my husband of forty-two years, who is wearing enormous black headphones and happily staring at a glowing screen, and decide it doesn’t matter where we’re buried. We are here now, alive and together, and that’s all that counts. You never know what’s around the corner. I want to live my remaining years as though they were my last.

This is what researching dead relatives will do for you.

Barbara H. Lewis riteme4@gmail.com

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"Sgt. Wm. K. Hawpe of Steele's Tavern at the 4th Replacement Depot in Yokohama, Japan where he is being processed for return to the United States and subsequent discharge from the service. Sgt. Hawpe has been in the army for 27 months and in Tokyo for five months with the 1st Calvary Divison."

My father's girlfriend? I found this picture among his papers.