Category: Letters to My Ancestors

Backstory:
I am in the early stages of a large project that involves researching my ancestors who arrived in the 17th century, their descendants, and their intertwined lives. I have also been studying creative non-fiction, where one suggested exercise was to write a letter to someone now deceased. I knew immediately who it would be and so I composed a letter to my 3rd great grandfather, Henry Taber. Subsequently, as I move forward with this project, I will draft letters to other ancestors whose story warrants a preliminary approach to their inclusion in the larger work. These letters to them will also provide an opportunity to draft initial thoughts on their stories. For me, these letters provide a gateway to this new project. For a reader, these letters may provide continuing interest in one of many extended families, in this instance, one whose roots were planted in the 17th century in what would become the United States in the late 18th century. While these letters will present the actions of the men and women of this large extended family, the stories of women will not simply focus on their efforts in raising children, keeping the families well fed and supporting their fathers, husbands, and sons. I was struck by the opening lines of a recently published Joy Harjo poem [1]—”In the lands of forgotten memories/I hear a woman singing”—and feel driven by the songs the women of these extended families sing to me over the centuries as I work to restore some of the forgotten or misplaced memories. And what I do with this extended family supplements what I did in archaeology—birds of a feather although with different feathers—prehistoric archaeology and centuries of family history joined closely by a strong interest in reconstructing some of the past. In my senior year of high school, I was writing a senior paper on three WW1-era poets and in another class reading Russian literature in translation. In the second class I found this short couple sentences from Yevgeny Yevtushenko [2]:
“We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.”
And wrote a poem inspired by my grandmother’s recounting of an early incidence in her life. Although an early school-girl poem, I published it in the Epilogue to Agatha! Little did I know that I would work to regenerate past lives throughout my life.
Recently, I read a letter Ted Hughes sent to his son [3] which closed with this line, which speaks directly to what I am attempting:
“And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living through you.”

I hope readers will take away the importance and value of both family and history, as well as, crucially, the part of the family in history.