(F)ANCESTOR- A Generational Memoir


FORWARD


“An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.”- Stephen Crane

“I don’t want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument.”- George Jackson 

                      
“Such is history stripped of its ornaments, and in plain drab!”- James E. Quinlan


     I wanted to start “in” the beginning. Ha! What a joke. Unless ancestry.com places you naked in the garden as the serpent slides down the branch, heading for that dangling apple in the dewy moonlight, you will never find a starting point…..tiny as a tree seed. Instead, we will have to pick a time and place to start any family history and leave it at that. Mine will be 1818.  
     It all began with my reading of a short book devoted to my mother’s great, great, etc. uncle, Richard Jennings, and his infamous murder in Sugar Loaf, New York. Allegedly, the first murder for hire in NY state, this was a little family salacity I could grasp onto. “The Murder of Richard Jennings” (complete with yellow police tape graphic novel styling) was a sparse outline of the conspiracy written in 2013 by Michael J. Worden, an ex-cop from Port Jervis. Historical crime buffery—not bad, but insufficient for a family murder, especially when it was my family getting murdered, as well as doing the murdering.
    There was nothing remarkable about Richard Jennings. He was a farmer in a town of farmers, a yeoman (land-owner) amongst yeomen. How could the murder of this unassuming man, from a nice family like my mother’s, cause such a stir? I wanted the backstory, so I blindly jumped down the rabbit hole chasing unknowns, somehow dear through blood, unable (or unwilling) to alter what I was to become, a fancestor.
    This obsession to know who we were (are?) never inflicted me until recently and now I’ve got a bad case. It took hold out of nowhere; unfortunately, after my grandparents and parents are now all gone. My parents, who couldn’t have cared less about their lineage, would’ve gotten a kick out of watching me bounce off the walls chasing down our DNA from coast to coast. I’m suddenly concerned with my genetic quirks and inbred nativist inadequacies. A little late I suspect, but in another respect, my timing is perfect. With the internet and google search engines, ancestry is now a dotcom craze (with or without the help of the Mormons). These days it’s all at your fingertips, and if your liminal branch has been swinging in the American breeze for 350 plus years, your family name will pop up somewhere. And in my case, almost everywhere. I’m a textbook case of what we here in the Catskills call a “local”— a hillbilly blue blood.

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