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Heritability


I am hauling out boxes and binders of Americana
Family history, collected and created by my mother.
In my youth, she and her mother discussed the who’s who and
The when and where of the Walkers, Dukes, the Johnsons and the Abbotts.
In Salem, they were the convicted witches and their accusers.
The first Duke Vermonter, reported Ruth, came over from Quebec in a hay wagon,
A Huguenot, a “French Jew” she said, who dodged the pitch-forks of the revenuers.
On the dining room table, tintypes, daguerreotypes, faded paper portraits from St. Johnsbury studios.
Yellowed newspaper clippings -- death notices and 95th birthday celebrations, poorly afixed in notebooks with deteriorating cellophane tape.
In my boxes now, my mother’s handwritten family trees on pre-printed pedigree charts.
She invented her own cross-referencing system and squeezed in irresistable details.
“Nathan Hanson. In Capt. Sam Runnel’s Co. of Col. Mooney’s Regiment, NH defense of RI, Rev. War. A private.”
Chart number 25 has room for five generations and thirty people, From Angeline Warren (m. Hiram Walker, 2 May 1848).  To Angeline’s great great grandmother Elizabeth Meader, 1684-1737, m. John Hanson July 23, 1703, whose own roots are found on Chart 103.
Notebooks are filled with penned details of family events and stories. 

Zipa Leonard Johnson was expelled from the Peacham church for having denounced slavery and the death of John Brown with too much passion.
She was never cut out to be a scribe, except for her devotion, 
She wrote out three copies, with wite-out, arrows, abbreviations and corrections.
Three copies, maybe more, on the chance that her daughter or another son might too be bug-bitten.

I am now the custodian
And notice that when I address an envelope, 

The scrawl runs quickly toward my mother’s illegibility.


Jay Wilkinson
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