Origins

      Joan Didion writes in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nations tell themselves stories called origin myths, which explain the past and adumbrate the future. Individuals have their equivalents in the form of family histories, genealogies, old letters, tattered photographs, musty files, tawny newspaper clippings, and the miscellaneous heirlooms tucked away in the attic. “Book of Generations” endeavors to compile, chronicle, annotate, archive, and preserve a familial origin myth, a personal pre-history, a specific and intimate archaeology.

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children.
—Deuteronomy 4:9

      It is our collective and inherited shame that we know so little of our forebears. We have neglected to remember in the active: to remember to remember. The inscription on many headstones reads, “Gone but not forgotten,” yet they have passed from memory into obscurity. This blog aims to reanimate their silenced voices, through the recollections of those still living and the mementos they left behind. The vast treasure of online information makes research into past generations easier than ever before, with millions of government documents now available digitally. These official records give shape and texture to our forebears when anecdotes and photographs are absent or insufficient.

      Genealogical inquiry synthesizes many of my longstanding fascinations: old family photographs, rural landscapes, Southern culture and history, the inimitable cadence and content of my elders’ storytelling. The narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men reflects, “I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so.” As I undertake this quest it is too late to hear from many of the “old timers” who have passed on, to ask them the questions that my research has posed, to hear from their own mouths how they experienced loneliness and camaraderie, hardship and joy, weakness and power. This dearth of first-person perspective is lamentable, yet embarking on this journey in my 27th year rather than in a later season of life, as is most common with students of genealogy, enables me to listen to, learn from, and record the reminiscences of three grandparents and numerous grand-aunts and uncles. They will travel with me down the country roads of memory as we craft our own origins myth.