Add up all the factual fragments to build your preferred family history

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." -- Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again" I pull most of the family information I post here from a box of letters and documents sent to me by my sister Molly. She challenged me to discover ways to assemble a family history from the disparate fragments. That's just what I've done, composed fragmented stories from memorabilia fragments. Find examples here, here and here.

Life is composed of fragments. We humans try to make sense of those fragments, infuse them with meaning. Writers try to link fragments into a meaningful whole, meaningful to us and to our readers. It's kind of like that screen blurb on certain movies: "Based on a true story." 

Any family tree tells incomplete stories of a person's life. I took a few from a family tree sketched on what is now a large, tattered sheet of liver-colored construction paper. Someone, and I don't know who, took the time to put down the names and details in what looks like a thin-point Sharpie. Many of these details you won't find on genealogy sites. 

My Grandfather's brother Thomas died on April 1, 1918 at 20, possibly a casualty of the 1918 flu pandemic. He was old enough to be a soldier in the Great War, as were his two older brothers, but no mention is made of that. But he was a "Natural Born Farmer, good with horses."

Grandfather, whom we called Big Danny, was also good with horses as every good cavalry officer should be. We heard the story a hundred times about how Gen. Pershing selected Big Danny's mount to ride while inspecting the troops in France in 1918. 

His brother Bernard  "served on the USS Cassin (Destroyer) WWI." He went to Ft. Lyons Hospital in Colorado Springs from "1920-22 "for a service connected disability." Upon release, he became a salesman. His son Dick was a Navy pilot in WWII who was "shot down, rescued someone, and received Navy medal." 

Big Danny spent time at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver in 1920-21 for a service-connected disability which was said to be pneumonia or possibly TB. Later, he became an insurance salesman.

My great-grandmother Molly, a woman I identified in an earlier post as "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," had a sister Annie who "ran boarding house, did not marry." No dotted lines run below her listing to link her with other names. Since Annie ran a boarding house, I'm sure she had stories to tell. She probably had family stories to tell too. Here's one question I'd like to ask Annie: How did you, sister of "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," end up as the old aunt who runs the boarding house? Thomas Wolfe's mother ran a boarding house in Asheville; Thomas was one of the boarders. He had many stories to tell. He died too soon.

The name Annie resonates with me. My mother was Anna Marie, my mother-in-law Ann Marie, and my daughter, Anne Marie. Anne is derived from Hannah and means "favored, grace."

My great great grandfather, Irish immigrant Thomas O'Shea, father of Michael Francis who married  the beautiful Molly, married Mary Burns and emigrated to the U.S. "about 1860." At some point, he "changed name to Shay." Not sure why he changed the family name. Maybe he was trying to simplify, jettison the O' and simplify spelling to Shay. The Irish were used to the O' and Mc parts of Irish names. Ellis Island personnel should have been, too, as hordes of Irish came over in the late 1840s and early 1850s to escape the potato famine. Maybe he was trying to pass as non-Irish. Admitted to the U.S., he could have trundled right over to Manhattan and landed a job.

Hello, my name is Tom Shay. I'm definitely not Irish so you can immediately give me a position in the executive ranks of your large Anglo-Saxon firm. 

Anybody would buy that line if they could understand what Tom said in his thick brogue and if he wasn't dressed in a cowpie-streaked farmer's overalls, wearing a straw hat, and brandishing a pitchfork. His neck would be red, too, as redneck was slang for all Irish who worked outside under the unfriendly sun. 

Welcome to the firm, Tom. Let me show you our secret handshake. 

Fantasy, of course. He was a farmer in Ireland and he was a farmer in Iowa. And father to eight kids. 

Big Danny (I mentioned him already)), grandson of Thomas and an Iowa City native, returned to his hometown after World War 1. Left to his own devices, he might have joined the ranks of Iowa farmers and Iowa Hawkeye fans. Having a 'hawkeye' means being "particularly observant, especially to small details, or having excellent vision in general." But Big Danny's hawkeye failed to notice a festering lung ailment that took him first to an Iowa army hospital and then to Denver's Fitzsimons. Big Danny married a nurse, got a job, bought a house, raised a family, and lived in Denver for the rest of his long life.

In a photo in front of Big Danny's house, my brother Dan and I wear army uniforms and carry rifles. I am 9 and he is 7. At the end of the year, we would be in a station wagon on our way to Washington state. We returned briefly after a stint in Kansas. We left six months later for Florida. Dan never returned to live in Denver. I did but couldn't stay.

You can't go home again, as it turns out.