Stories about my Father - 31
“Everything in nature is resurrection.”
I’ve seen that quote from Voltaire over the past couple of years, but it never struck me until yesterday. It’s on the side of a church on the east side that, since I’ve started incessantly roaming the streets of the city, I’ve ended up walking past several times.
It’s election day, today. Two years ago, while this was happening, I was riveted to the television. This year the television is off. I am on the couch with the cat curled up on my lap listening to him purr. There was a coffee-pouring incident earlier that resulted in some hissing and biting and tail thrashing, but we seem to have moved on from that. After I settled in, and he sat with his back to me for a bit, the lure of the lap was simply too much. He’s now curled up in the crook of my legs. A perfect Mobius strip – I can’t tell where he begins or ends.
As I dig through my family’s stories and figure out who they all were, I have created a checklist for them. Where were they born? Where did they die? Where did they go to school? (if they went to school). When did they marry? (if they married). Who were their parents and who were their kids? What did they do? There are so many disparate lives spread out in front of me on the living room floor. Some fought in wars, and some stayed home. Having at least one family member who fought in every war this country has ever been involved in up until Korea, my family, so far, seems, remarkably, to have avoided ever having suffered a casualty. They have all lived here and been through every election that the United States of America has ever had.
All these people whose DNA I have a piece of, lived the same cycle of life that we are all living now. They were born, grew up, went to work, made families, and died. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The first successful photograph in history was taken by a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. He’d managed to create images ten years before, but he couldn’t stop them from turning black when they hit the sunlight. He went into partnership with Louis Daguerre in 1829 and together they finally developed what came to be known as the tintype or, officially, the daguerreotype. Unfortunately, Niépce died before they could finish it, so Daguerre’s name alone is on the 1839 patent.
In 1851, an English artist named Frederick Scott Archer invented a different method called the collodion process. Whereas Daguerre’s images were etched in metal, Archer’s were etched in glass which could then be printed on paper. It wasn’t until 1888 that George Eastman registered his film process for making photographs under the name Kodak. Apropos of nothing, Eastman made up the word kodak. He thought it sounded like the shutter clicking on his invention.
As far as I can tell, the oldest family photographs I have are of my great-great-great-grandfather, John Gilbert Mastin. He died in Versailles, Kentucky on December 19, 1867. I have two photographs of him – one is a collodion studio portrait and the other is a little framed daguerreotype. Given when he died, they are both at least 125 years old. I have had the tin-type picture for almost as long as I can remember. My grandmother must have let me have it when I was a kid. I never knew who the ghostly old man was until the day before yesterday when I found the other portrait with his name written on the back.
John Gilbert Mastin was born in 1793 before the invention of photography. He married Jane Miller in 1833. At the time, he was forty and she was eighteen. I have a rather terrifying picture of her as well but from when she was much older. It was probably taken at the same time her husband’s photo was. Jane’s father John Miller was the same age as her new husband. Jane’s mother was a woman named Elizabeth Hutton and Elizabeth’s father was named James Hutton. James fought in the American Revolution.
James Hutton, as long ago as he lived, is not some shadowy, mythic figure from the dim and murky past. That’s just how he looks to us from here in 2022. At the time, he was just a guy. He breathed, and ate, and shit, and fucked and he fought for something he believed in. He died in 1833 the same year that Niépce did. So, unfortunately, James missed being immortalized in a photograph by a relative hair.
I don’t know what’s going to happen during today’s election. In many ways, it is far more fraught than the last one was, which is really saying something. There is nothing to be done, though, except wait for the results. I cast my vote a few days ago and, as much as I wish there was something more I could do, there just isn’t. Like the lines on an EKG, today will either end up as a peak or a valley. Hopefully, it won’t be a full-blown cardiac event as so many fear, but that remains to be seen. Time’s machine will keep on scratching out scratchy, pointed lines long after this day has passed.
In 507 BC, a Greek leader named Cleisthenes convinced his people to change the basis of how they were governed from one where allegiance was to the extended family to one where allegiance was to their locality. The people of Athens then created a system of government that they called democracy. All adult male citizens, which made up between 10% and 15% of the population, were allowed to vote for representatives to the Ecclesia. After two hundred years of living under this system, the Macedonians took over, ditched the idea of democracy, and reestablished an oligarchic rule. Two thousand-five hundred years later, we face the possibility of experiencing the same thing.
“Everything in nature is resurrection.”
Both my grandmother Eunice and my great-grandmother Jennie are the ones largely responsible for my having access to all my family information. Their photo albums are labeled well enough that I can usually deduce who people are and what their connection to each other is. It looks as if, later in her life, Jennie took several old albums and a stack of loose pictures and put them all together in a new album. She’s written underneath each picture who most people are. Rather than gluing the photos down, she used photo corners so that they can be removed. On the back of them, you can see that she’d peeled some of them out of an older album because they are covered with the torn remains of old black paper. On some, however, there’s written even more information. Unfortunately, the paper in Jennie’s newer album was crap, and it’s become extremely brittle. Fingernail flecks of old yellow paper are all over the living room. I finally scanned all the pages yesterday to make sure I don’t start losing anything important. Jennie tried to save all that information and now I am trying to do the same thing.
Jennie lived with Eunice and Morris during most of my father’s childhood. Dad heard more family stories from her than he did from anyone else. The family history was important to her, and she passed that on to all of us. Eunice continued consolidating and adding to the information and then so did my father. They both passed those stories down to my sister and me.
Eunice became a member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 1950s. To apply for membership in the DAR, you need to be able to prove that one of your ancestors fought in the war. Because of that, Eunice did most of the research that traced our line back to James Hutton. The DAR, of course, was the organization that refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing in their hall in 1939 which led to her performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Yet another instance of petty, short-sighted bigotry leading to an iconic moment in the ongoing war against it. If nothing else, however, they are useful for us amateur genealogists.
Whatever the results of today’s election are, they will slip into history faster than a speeding bullet. What seems so ominous and fraught to us all today will only be somewhat remembered and understood by those few after us who choose to look back. Will all those who are voting today to dismantle our current system be happy with what results if they succeed? Sadly, I don’t think most of them have even given what they are pushing for coherent thought. They just want to win.
Michael just started cooking his breakfast and the cat leaped blindly off my lap at the first clunk of his pan hitting the stove. However good he had it curled warmly between my legs, the possibility of what might be better in the kitchen was too much for him to resist. I know that he isn’t going to get anything by standing there, but he doesn’t.
“Everything in nature is resurrection.”
We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again. If you haven’t voted, then please do. If you have, then go outside and fully enjoy this spectacular day. We don’t get many of them. It shouldn’t be missed.