A veil can be a piece of cloth used to hide a face. It can also be anything that conceals or obscures. “Beyond the veil” is defined as a hidden, mysterious place. I can’t think of any aspect of genealogy that doesn’t interest me, but there are some that hold a special fascination. One is researching at the cusp of that misty territory where surnames are still crystallizing and places were not yet organized as the are today, so that they are all but unrecognizable. Even the spellings of given names can be odd in that special way that things feel strange when they skirt the edge of the expected without ever feeling quite right. Dialect words and spellings can give whole groups of records that not-quite-right feeling. Handwriting isn’t necessarily “bad,” as it can be in any time period, but truly alien, bearing little resemblance to anything more recent, or even human. Records become uneven, but still dangle hope. It is hard to precisely define what that genealogical veil is, but eventually one learns to recognize it when one reaches it. You see the fog roll into view and you know you are there.
Lately, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research where that fog bank begins. Places like the Margraviate of Baden and the Duchy of Berg, both places that might be considered Germany, yet the modern nation was still hundreds of years in the future, and at any time a dynastic squabble or marriage might make or break such a place. Given names have an odd ring. “Stingen” was not the lead singer for an early German-speaking version of The Police, but rather Christina. Men and women sometimes appear in records with only their given names; that was, apparently, enough. Other times they appear as being “of” a place. That place name was not their surname. If they moved, it would change, breaking the continuity that can normally be gleaned from names. Yet a son or a daughter might no longer have that “of” in their name. They might leave home and yet still retain that place in their names. A surname was perhaps being born, and, at the same time, it was hinting at their recent place of origin, the kind of double duty that can be so necessary when researching at the veil. The fog was perhaps just barely lifting.
I find special meaning at this place. Beyond it, the common man and woman begin to fade from view. Not just some people, the veil is not a brick wall that appears for that one troubling ancestor, it isn’t a troubling gap in the records, but a threshold. Beyond it, genealogy is still possible, but it is done in the fog and mist.