Family (July/August 1995 | Volume: 46, Issue: 4)

Family

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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July/August 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 4

I have been haunted by the same nightmare for some 20 years now. In it, I am running through long dimly lit corridors in a basement somewhere. My father’s father is said to be dying in a room off one of them. I somehow have the power to save him if I can just get there in time, but I haven’t his room number and no one is around to help me. The empty halls intersect, shoot off at odd angles, seem to turn back on one another. And all the time the clock is ticking. Then I wake up, sweating, and remember that my grandfather, to whom I was very close, is long dead, that when he did die I was halfway across the continent. I wished then, I clearly still wish, that I could somehow have kept him alive forever.

 

That is why I am a little envious of the writer Ian Frazier, for he has managed, in a literary sense, to perform that miracle for a whole host of his forebears in his wonderful recent book Family. It was the deaths of his parents that set him to searching through his family’s past. Cleaning out their home, he writes, he began to keep two files, a Mom Museum and a Dad Museum, and to let the leads he found there take him where they would, looking for “a meaning that would defeat death.”

I’m giving away nothing when I say he really never finds one—beyond a newfound belief that we, like the country, “came from somewhere and are going somewhere. We must pursue.” And I mean no disrespect when I add that there is nothing especially notable about Frazier’s ancestors; his is an old but pretty ordinary Ohio and Indiana clan. But his account of it is among the most affecting works of history I’ve read in years.

I should have known it would be. His earlier book Great Plains is a masterpiece of another kind, a series of interconnected essays filled with odd details that seem at first strangely random: Some Plains warriors, fearing they might oversleep and thus miss a dawn attack on their enemies, took care to drink a lot of water before going to bed; the tumbleweed, ubiquitous symbol of the American West, is actually a relatively recent import from the Russian steppes; an occupational hazard for buffalo hunters was death from skunk bite; Lawrence WeIk bought his first accordion with earnings from a trapline. At first Frazier’s spiky data seem randomly chosen, but as the pages turn, their cumulative effect is to blur the distinction between then and now, creating a new and remarkable landscape where, as one reviewer wrote, “the past lies alongside the present.”

Anyone who has endured an evening with an overly enthusiastic amateur genealogist knows how truly tedious family history can be: the sheer volume of faceless names and dates, the tenuous links to the celebrated