My Genealogy Story
Tom and Ray Wolfe, 1941 (Wolfe family collection)
Every genealogist and family historian has a story—how their interest was pricked, how a quest for records, relationships, and stories began. Here’s mine. It’s the beginning of a larger work, which can be found here.
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This essay began when I was a kid. Not even four, I found myself down in that cool, dank basement of ours where my dad would sit on the edge of a folding chair in front of his humming electric typewriter and pound out all manner of texts, from letters to speeches to manifestos. In this instance, late in the summer of 1975, with me listening to the rhythmic clack-clacking of his keyboard, it was a history of the Wolfe family: “Origin of the Species; or, Whatever Happened to Good Old What’s-His-Name.” Composed on the occasion of the family’s biennial reunion, the essay charted out his paternal line in a voice that was self-consciously silly and heavily ironic while also somewhat apologetic. It was almost as if he had the humorist Richard Armour perched on one shoulder, egging him on to make the next dumb joke, while on the other stood my mom, puffing on a Marlboro and reminding him that he would do well to tread carefully. It’s easy to forget, sitting way down there in the basement, slurping from your bottomless can of PBR, that not everyone will be in on the joke.
“If the writer digresses here or there and the reader should happen to learn something,” my dad typed, “he should savor this knowledge like a fine wine, lobster, or, at today’s prices, hamburger.” And then, as if in response to a smoky exhale coming from his other shoulder, he also wrote, “Certainly, no attempt has been made to embarrass anyone. The intent has been merely to put some life into something that might otherwise be about as exciting as outlining a declarative sentence for an English grammar class.”
But here, I think, the old man protested too much. There was nothing at all boring about the stories that poured forth when he got to talking, or for that matter typing, about the Wolfe family. For instance, there was his great-grandfather, John Richard Wolfe, who fled the Irish potato famine and perhaps, too, the British authorities, traveling all the way to the farmland of Lost Nation, in Clinton County, Iowa. There was John Richard’s son Maurice—pronounced “Morris”—who, my dad wrote, still spoke with the family’s North Kerry brogue and carried more than a bit of the Wolfe lawlessness.
“The writer knows little about him,” Dad admitted, “but it can be assumed he became a Catholic and a Democrat at approximately the same time. It is possible, however, that he inherited some of his father’s Marxist revolutionary ideas although there is no record of political insurrection in Lost Nation or Toronto during his lifetime. It is well known in Lost Nation, though, that Grandfather Maurice attended his agrarian pursuits in spurts which he called ‘five year plans.’ His favorite tools were the hammer and sickle.”
My dad’s own father, Ray, shoveled horse manure for the Navy during World War I. “He caught no Germans,” Dad wrote, “but he did catch the flu. In 1925 he caught Gladys McGinn of Petersville. (She was only twenty-two at the time, but that didn’t stop her from continually telling her own children that no one with a grain of sense married under thirty. To gently remind her of her own age in 1925 only brought about a foot stomping and the response, ‘That was different.’)”
Gladys died before I was born, but I remain grateful for this brief but vivid portrait of her. Dad once told me that she taught him the birds and the bees by leaving a textbook of sorts on the dining room table, open to the appropriate pages. She never broached the subject again.
Rural Central Iowa by Carl Wycoff (Flickr / CC)
Ray died of cancer in 1941, leaving his nine-month-old son, his wife, and their three daughters to fend for themselves on a couple hundred acres of Iowa farmland. There, Dad lived inside his imagination. He became his hero, Jackie Robinson, by throwing balls against the barn and scooping up grounders. He found stacks of freshly mown hay to be occasions for an intense kind of dreaming. “What I remember most about farm life,” he once wrote, “was an aching feeling of loneliness.” That’s how Dad described those years in his less guarded moments—lonely and even a little scary. He raised me on stories of hopscotching tornadoes, man-eating sows, and a downed power line that nearly killed him.
There were stories, too, of the Wolfes who had settled that land, John R. and the rest, who built their farms, their churches, their large families. Perhaps because I grew up in the city and preferred, whenever possible, to remain indoors, these tales occasioned my own sort of dreaming. They activated in me a longing for this place for which I was deeply unsuited to live—not so different maybe from the way the loss of a father had activated in my dad a need to know his own family, to map it across the hills of Clinton County and all the way back to Kerry and West Limerick.
Hence the clack-clack-clack of Dad’s electric typewriter in the summer of ’75. When his parents should have been celebrating their golden anniversary, they lived, precariously, only in stories. And when Dad himself died, in 2012, I felt called to collect and preserve and even proselytize those stories—if nothing else, as a gift to him.
This essay, in other words, began then, too.
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