Just yesterday I was driving home from a presentation and I passed where an aunt of mine once lived. Now you can only guess that people once lived there. The house is gone and nothing has replaced it. The land is covered by grass and a scatter of trees but, on closer inspection, the empty space that remains looks like it ought to have a building on it. I noticed that there were two gaps in the curb where there had once been driveways. Now they would be driveways to nowhere. Clearly they had once led to somewhere where people lived.
A few days earlier I drove my daughter around to look at a place for her to work on a photography project. Her teacher had told her about an old abandoned barn that she could use. When we got there, we found the old farmyard was surrounded by new houses still in the process of being built. The abandoned farmhouse was ringed by a fence and signs that read “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” We couldn’t even see the barn, it might have been too far off the road or it might have been already gone. On the way home we made a sort of game of looking for “ruins.” In an area with lots of new construction, they are few and far between, but we did spot ruined stone pillars that once supported a gate, that blocked access to a private drive that no longer exists, which must have led to a home that is probably long gone.
Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by such things. In first grade I went to a school that had steps outside the schoolyard. They went up to nothing but a fence. My father explained to me that long ago the school had been where the playground was and that long ago when they needed to rebuild the school, they built the new one on top of the old playground, then tore down the old one and put the playground there. Those steps once went up much further and ended not at a fence but at the front door.
These are time’s echoes. They are not all of what was, but they bare witness to it. They are time’s tidbits, its trail of breadcrumbs. Things left behind. They are things that I like to see because they make me wonder. They are also the things we like to erase because they no longer fit, or perhaps because they make us wonder in what might be an uncomfortable way for some. Do they remind us of a past that no longer is, and, therefore, remind us that there will come a time when we are part of that past that no longer is?
I’ve been translating some Norwegian farm books over the last few days. They are full of those little things that have been remembered and retold for hundreds of years. One has to wonder what a story of a troll luring a woman to her death at the bottom of a five-hundred-foot-deep lake really represents. Stories like that are, perhaps, hints of what once was, like those gaps in the curb. Anyone who notices those gaps could assume that a house once stood there but only through research, or, in my case, memory, can one know what the house looked like, or who lived there.
So much of what we do in genealogy is like this. We read along looking for those ancient names on the page, those gaps in the curb. Then we stop, question, and seek to fill in the details of the house that once stood where only that gap remains.