‘Family, ’ as it is known in the United States, is going down. Maybe we were never destined to be a nation where family members stayed connected with one another. The United States is almost completely comprised of immigrants, most of us come from people who picked up and abandoned their native shores and families. We have no real feel for the people they left behind. They’re some names on a line on a family trees, the people between a birth and death date.

But one day, some mother or father said an anguished good-bye to a young man, woman, or family. The next generation completely and forever disappeared from view, driving down the lane in a horse-drawn cart, or pulling away from a dock.

I certainly don’t know these people from the four sides of my family. I can’t say I have relationships with hardly anyone who pre-dates my grandparents or great-grandparents, and I know little about what moved them, stirred them, or drove their survival.

I do know I have stood on a vacant lot in Brooklyn that once held a Lutheran church where my paternal great-great grandparents baptized my grandmother’s mother.
I have stood in a hushed, nearly hidden cemetery in Tennessee where my maternal great-great-grandfather is buried with his wife and infant.

I have sat in a marbled cathedral with swooping bats and swallows where my Filipino grandfather was baptized.

I have been driven across the fields where my maternal great grandparents raised vegetables, cows, chickens, and children.

I recently uncovered a faint line of writing in an old family bible, newly given to my original Norwegian ancestors in 1860. If I hadn’t been curious about a page that seemed stuck to another one, I would have never known that my great-great-grandfather Aanen Atlakson died of stomach cancer on Christmas Eve, 1869, quickly followed by his eldest son, who died of pneumonia.

This is the only story I have. I suspect that a string of tragic deaths in Aanen's family--he and his wife Caterina lost their last five children as infants --silenced the stories of coming to America.

Without stories, I cling to facts, dig up facts, or make up stories of my own. What else can I do?