A pandemic diary: Of times and lives

November 13, 2020

Genealogy is fascinating for a lot of reasons, and I don’t mean finding out that your ancestor stood with the embattled farmers at Lexington. (If all the people who claim their relatives were there on that day are telling the truth, the colonials would’ve outnumbered the redcoats by about a million to one.) With luck and a little research, you can go beyond names and dates to get a feel for the lives your people led, and the choices they made.

Thanks to a diarist in the family, I know my great-grandfather was a teacher and farmer in northern Illinois, who was “excepted” from service in the Civil War and courted a few women before settling down. He and my great-grandmother had six children, two of them dying in infancy and only my grandfather Hoyt Swan living past age thirty. From an obituary my mother transcribed, I learned that her great-uncle had been “sidetracked” and “back-slidden” from his faith, but was brought back to church by his wife’s prayers. My mother told me some of her other relatives lived in a house where, it was sometimes said, “Nobody’s talking to anybody today.”

Today, the whole country seems to have a long-term lease on that place. And of course, the trouble with probing the past is discovering that Aunt Nellie was fond of laudanum and Colonel or Captain Somebody fought on the wrong side. Speaking of wrong sides, I recently found that some of my ancestors enslaved Black people in New England in the 1700s. According to family histories and a list of tombstones in a Connecticut cemetery, there were at least four of them, known only as Cato, Cuff, David, and Dinah. There could have been others. I’m pretty sure there are more enslavers whose crimes I haven’t documented yet.

These people never dreamed that future generations would reach back into their lives as easily as reading a newspaper. Because I don’t have children, nobody’s likely to be tracing me on some 23rd-century Ancestry.com. But 2020 will be a milestone for everyone.

Some of our descendants will find we wore masks, stopped hugging, stayed indoors, and generally took care of each other. Others will see their grandparents’ grandparents proudly packed like sardines into Trump rallies, bars, and college parties. Some will read “Black Lives Matter” in their forbears’ files; for others it’ll be “All Lives Matter,” which as historians will point out, means nobody matters unless they’re white. We’ll all be reviled for doing so little to stop climate change, which will leave Earth far different, far sooner than we think. But those who called it a hoax will earn a special place in our children’s vision of hell.

For anyone who’s looking me up a few centuries down the line: I hope you’ll give me credit for acknowledging some ugly truths about my heritage and keeping a sense of humor amid the pandemic. If it’s still the present, take care and be safe. (PS to the future: I loved my wife, music, and beaches. I hope the water in the Gulf of Mexico is still that color.)

Originally published at http://davesswan.wordpress.com on November 12, 2020.

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