Family Trees Are Just Names
Loyal readers,
We here at Burnside hope you had a lovely Easter, and now that Lent is over and you can drink beer again, we hope you’re enjoying that, too.
Over Easter, my grandpa gave me all the documentation he had on our family tree. I recently found ancestry.com and filled in a few generations. The network on the site connects you to matches it finds in other family trees, but I didn’t have enough information to make any breakthroughs. With my grandpa’s research in hand, I got home and starting putting names in.
After 15 minutes, I was back 10 generations, and 15 minutes more yielded 20. That feeling when the names of your ancestors opens up…it’s a pretty good feeling. It turns out I’m about as white as you can get: England, Ireland, Holland, Germany…the regular deal.
But the farther I went back, unpeeling layers of ancestry with clicks of my mouse, the more frustration set in. I was looking at names of my family, people without whom I wouldn’t exist, and all I knew were these names. I saw my first ancestors hitting the shores of the United States long before the Revolutionary War, and I wondered about the epic stories of how they got there, what made them leave their homes in search of something new. These people were just names on a computer screen.
When John Pattison told me he wanted to post the names of the men and women killed in Iraq, I made an immediate connection. The dead in Iraq are names to us, but most of the time we don’t even know the names, let alone the stories they’ve left behind, and I didn’t feel frustration anymore, just sadness.
Along with our Iraq theme, Zach Binsfield checks in from Iraq with his thoughts over Easter in our general articles section, and our friend Hannah’s husband is back home safe after a long deployment to the Sandbox.
We have a unique purpose, as writers, to leave behind records of our lives and thoughts.
One of my favorite writers did this as well as anyone. I read Slaughterhouse 5 in 1999, and it set off a jag of reading any Kurt Vonnegut book I could get my hands on. While everything I read from him was great, none of the books ever matched the beauty and wonder I found in that first reading. Post your memories of Kurt Vonnegut’s books below…we want to hear your stories.
As writers not fit to change the ink in Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter, we raise our glass to a great man.
Enjoy this Spring, everyone.
Jordan Green
BWC
Posted on April 16, 2007 12:00 AM
Comments
I read "Cat's Cradle" my senior year of high school, loved it, and went on to "Breakfast of Champions." While I still respect Vonnegut, his quirkiness seems better left in my teenage years.
Posted by: Stephanie Nikolopoulos | April 17, 2007 11:11 AM
Bluebeard is the first book I ever read "again." I know most of it by heart.
Palm Sunday is the first book I ever quoted in conversation.
Bagombo Snuff Box holds the record for the book that has stayed on the back of my commode the longest.
Mother Night scared the crap out of me and became the second book I ever read "again."
Deadeye Dick made me want to write stories.
Deadeye Dick "again" made me want to stop writing stories.
You people have no reason to care about any of this. But Kurt Vonnegut is almost solely responsible for me having a job doing "what I do" today. God bless him...
Posted by: Billy | April 18, 2007 1:59 PM
I work at a local history museum, and deal with many folks researching their ancestral lines. It has convinced me (as if I needed more convincing), that humans are very self-absorbed.
Most study their family tree not to learn about others, rather to learn about themselves. 'Where does my love of music come from? Who had blue eyes like me? Who was rich and famous?' We place ourselves firmly in the centre of the story.
It will unfortunately be the case as well with the names of those lost in Iraq... we have little interest in what they loved, who they loved, or what their nicknames were in the third grade. They died to protect us. Again, we place ourselves firmly in the centre of the story.
Posted by: wilsonian | April 27, 2007 5:40 PM
My brother is going to Iraq this month. For some reason I never really paid attention to the war, if it was just or why or even if that matters....then my brother got deployed and I find myself seraching for answers but the search either leads my to my ultra-conservative dad's convictions who views Bush as a God, the anti-Bush citizens who attend or teach at my university, or the media who each have false facts for and against it.
All that to say, until my brother got deployed I didn't pay much attention to it. I knew it was there but it kind of lingered in the back of my mind, pushed aside by other "important things" but now it is a reality in my life because it has to DO with me....which is selfish but honest. My brother is 19 years old who enlisted in the Marine Reserves right after High School. He's leaving May 17th. He is more than a name to me and that fact, as of late, has opened my eyes about a lot of things.
Posted by: Tat | April 28, 2007 6:56 AM