Roots
When my dad died a month ago, I became the oldest living direct descendant in my family.
My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and all who came before me, stretching back to Adam (or Lucy, if you prefer), are gone now.
This new status doesn’t make me feel like an orphan. My stepmother, who has been my mother for 47 years, comes from hardy stock and may outlive me. And I have an aunt who’s only a half-generation older than me who will be around for a long time to come.
And it's not as if facing the prospect of becoming part of the oldest generation has made me feel elderly — yet. I’m only 56. But the significance of my dad's death is already making me look at the past differently.
I’ve always been the unofficial memory-keeper in my family. But even I, the supposed expert and stickler for details, know little about our roots.
When I was born, nine of my forebears were still alive. But while they were here, I didn’t spend enough time talking to them about their pasts. Now it’s too late. Few of them bothered to write down even a brief autobiography and nobody kept a journal.
Somehow, there are all kinds of impediments to passing down family history and lore. You'd think it would be such a simple task and that there would be plenty of time in everyone's life to do it.
When I moved to Chico, I was curious about what it was like for my dad’s family to have lived here for a few months in the late 1920s.
My dad was born in Chico. He was the first member of his family to have been born in California. But, of course, he couldn’t tell me anything. He was still a baby when he, his parents and five brothers and sisters left Chico. My dad’s oldest brother was 10 when the family came here. But he’s no help because he’s not interested in thinking about the past. A lot of people are like that.
My dad and I tried to find a landmark that would attest to our family’s stay in Chico. My dad’s birth certificate gave a home address. We found the spot, not far from First Avenue and The Esplanade, but the house looked too new to have been around in 1927. The Polk Directory showed no occupant by the name of Brown living at that address in either 1927 or 1928.
My dad was the only one of his siblings to have been born in a hospital. So I showed him the building on Flume Street that once housed Enloe Hospital, not knowing if there were other hospitals in Chico at the time. Just six weeks later the old hospital building burned down. So much for landmarks.
I often think about what it would have been like if my dad and his family had stayed in Chico. I’d be able to claim old-timer status.
But we’re not that kind of family. We don’t stay in one place. I’ve been in Chico 10 years, and that seems like a long time. When Chico didn’t work out for my dad’s family, they moved to the Bay Area. When I was growing up, most of my relatives lived there. But in the last 40 years just about all of us have migrated to more rural parts of the state.
We are a rootless family, and we leave few behind traces of our existence. What is known about our lives rarely outlives us. The family narrative is too fragmented to offer any clues about how our background might have shaped us. And every time a person dies without having said much about what they did and why they did it, we become even more cut off from our past.