Is it life or is it décor? Being a genealogist changes us. Even the walls of Cracker Barrel breathe and talk, reminding us of the value and fate of every man and woman.
It’s Monday. Baked chicken and dressing day at Cracker Barrel. Somehow, my husband and I often end up at the same table, third on the left, looking at the same portrait. A beautiful young woman who likely grew up around the turn of the 19th century. For most, she is a standard part of the quaint décor, I suppose.
I am a genealogist, though. Her face captivates me whenever I sit at this table. I do not see décor, but another woman looking back at me. I see a life already lived, a human being come and gone. I know nothing of her, except what the portrait itself reveals. She was fairly well off. She came into adulthood before Zelda Fitzgerald and the Roaring Twenties altered fashion and morés. She was nearsighted, and I suspect she was a reader, which made the spectacles important to her identity.
As she sat for the portrait, how did she feel about her life, I wonder? Did she recognize her own value? What did she imagine the days ahead would bring to her? And did they?
I will probably never know her particular story. But what does it say about me, about us, about genealogists, that an image like this wakes us up? It fills us with questions and with the desire to dig until the answers surface.
What did this beautiful creature leave behind when her days here ended? Loving memories for those still living? Children who would have children who would have children? Did she write? Did she paint? Did she serve? Did she lead? Did she give? Did she live long, or are we looking at the last days of a life too short?
There is something so deeply valuable and meaningful—even spiritual—about asking the question, “Who were you?” to the images, the tombstones, and the names in a family tree. We are recognizing the innate value of every human being. We are recognizing the inevitable fate of every human being. We are seeing ourselves in those who built the world we inherited.
I love that we ask these questions. I love that we do everything we can to answer these questions. For our research is one of the most valuable things we will leave behind, next to our own descendants.
If this is the only fragment of this woman’s life remaining, then I thank her. I thank her for the day that she sat for a portrait, captured a moment, and gave me the privilege of caring about another life, if just for a moment over baked chicken at Cracker Barrel.
I look into a face like this, and wonder if my own face—some even-now faded portrait of me at twenty, with everything ahead of me—will someday look out of a dusty old frame at strangers. Will those who view it see décor, or will they see a life? Will they have any idea what I did to leave my world better than I found it? And will I have?
And I go home, determined to do just that. Genealogy can do that to a person.
What an eloquent post! I have often wondered similar things when I see those old photos at Cracker Barrell.
Thank you, Kari. Don’t you just want to label them? A name, birth, death, and hometown, at least? Ah well.