Genealogy as Blood Sport Or Why the Best Kin are Dead Kin

Well, sort of. We did get shot at. But missed. Fortunately. It all started when my mother accompanied me out east to a conference in Massachusetts. Tom couldn't come with me, given his added workload, as much as he and I would have liked to have made the trip together. Mother was an excellet travel partner and we planned to go and look for graves of long dead relatives from the Berkshires and some of the more hinterlandish parts of upstate New York. I'll talk about the New York part of the adventure another time.

The weather was cooperative, holding off on the promised snow/sleet combo. Most of the Amherst locals had never heard of Peru, MA, and the ones who had only noted glumly that it was the place that got the first and worst of the bad weather that later descended on them. Chanting our mantra "it's only a rental", we collected our courage and headed up the mountains. We had also been warned about terribly maintained, nausea-inducing roads. All I can say is that those folks have never careened their way to Point Reyes with my dad. This was a cakewalk and the roads were far superior to most public throughfares in the Golden State these days. The trees were gorgeous in ways that ranged from picture postcard to Ansel Adams. Folks were friendly, gregarious and poor.

As we were on a hunt for dead relatives, finding old graveyards was of tantamount importance. People were by and large exceptionally knowledgable about burial sites in their own town/parishes, but amazingly clueless as to what existed in the next (i.e adjoining, 2 miles up the road) village, even as far as churches and schools. But the Dodge/Hodgkins brothers, the trucking Click and Clack of Berkshire County were veritable gazetteers. Thanks to them we found quite obscure cemeteries on what could pass for goat tracks on a good day. Mother and I were amazed at how well we could follow his verbal sketches of directions. Althought we ultimately ascertained that few, if any, direct relatives reposed in Peru, we could not help but marvel at the miles and miles of huge black stone fences these forebears had lugged together. Even in what appeared to us as dense forest, we found running fences in remarkably good shape, given that they were probably built before 1830, according to the Kellogg's - local librarians and historians. Clearly, these forests were once cultivated areas, which partially explains the lack of old-growth forest in these hills.

But on to the gunfire. "Uncle Tom" Dodge advised us to visit old Norm Sanderson in the next village, as he was alleged to know quite a bit about local folks and their burial places, have some kind of genealogy book and even be a distant cousin. He did advise that Norm was "a little grumpy", but thought that a visit at suppertime would be a good idea. Said and done, we followed his instructions and found the fellow's tidy home directly across from the fire station. Lights were shining from the old-fashioned kitchen's windows and Mother agreed to go and try to talk to the old man. After knocking at the breezeway door and getting no answer, thinking that the old duffer was probably hard of hearing, she proceeded to knock on the kitchen door, where she spotted a long oxygen tube going to another room. Somehow connecting this infirmity to being hard of hearing, Mother daringly opened the door and called out to him. If you've ever cornered an old raccoon, you can imagine the angry, indignant hissing that emerged from around the corner. Suffice it to say that he ordered mother with a good deal of invective, denture rattling and ornery to remove herself from the property postehaste, we complied with alacrity and agitation, feeling very badly that we'd upset the crusty curmudgeon.

Our pity was short lived. We got about 250 yards from the property, and were in the process of asking a neighbor about the local cemeteries, when a rifle shot rang out from Sanderson's house. It sounded like an old blunderbuss and seemed to be aimed at the fire station or where our car recently was parked. The poor old coot probably wanted to scare us and our gang of maurauding Amazonian bandits d'une age certain off once and for all. As for us, we were terrified that the gent would blow himself to kingdom come, still attached to his oxygen candula cum candle. Fortunately, we spoke with his daughter the next day, and she was most apologetic about her "cranky" father - and appalled to learn that he still had a firearm in the house at all, much less firing it off at visiting would-be relations.

I recently remarked to my Tom that all of our relatives were either in the phonebook or the graveyard and I think I know where I'd prefer to look.