A trail of book crumbs

I thought I knew all the juicy family “secrets.” The marriages, the not-quite marriages and, well, the one about the many-greated uncle — a farmer who was shot to death on a dirt road I have actually walked. The story is that my relative discovered someone was stealing his chicken feed and he poisoned the feed in order to rat out the culprit. The neighbor farmer whose chickens all up and died was clearly not pleased.

(Another distant relative, an aunt who ran a boarding house, was poisoned to death with arsenic-laced chicken and dumplings by a mentally ill woman who was later killed while breaking into someone else’s home. I’m not sure what these stories say about my family, but there we are.)

As I said, I knew a lot. My mother’s family were talkers. But, you never what you’re going to find out when you start digging through the family papers — all of which are suddenly in my possession upon my mother’s death. (Lord, have mercy. There are a lot of papers — including the deeds to every single deceased family member’s burial site. Where we afraid they would be evicted at some point?)

Along with the grave information, pun fully intended, I have discovered two things. One: The reason my Victorian-era grandmother told me twins ran in the family each time I was expecting (she was 100 years old when my youngest was born) is that she was a twin.

“Who had twins?” I remember asking each time she mentioned it. She never answered. Victorian stoicism must have kept her from wanting to discuss a brother who — based on his absence from a single photograph from her early childhood — must have died before they turned 3.

Discovery two is something that I knew in theory, but of which I never anticipated to have tangible proof. A stack of Bibles that are literally crumbling to bits with age shows I come from a long line of believers.

One great-great grandfather’s Bible was particularly touching. It was underlined, annotated and full of letters pleading for a wayward daughter to seek God. Such were tucked into the pages after his death by that daughter. There was also a Sunday School attendance pin and a mysterious receipt for a money transfer to Scotland.

I’ve Nancy Drewed my way through the pages — even figuring out the Scotland thing. But, what has most impressed me is the written prayers. He was praying for his descendants — of whom I am one of many, born decades after his death.

My Victorian grandmother — whose Bible is also worn to fragments — was also praying for descendants. Just one prayer, dated January 1973, was written down in her Bible. It was a multi-faceted prayer that wasn’t fully answered for many years. But, I’m just old enough to know that circumstances that began to unfold that very year — and caused two branches of her descendants to move cross country — were a beginning to that answer.

Did my mother, who began handling the same trail of book crumbs when my Victorian grandmother died, realize the same thing? That God has been at work for so very long? Was she as thankful then as I am now? Did the discovery inspire her to pray for her own descendants — and all those who might not have had great-great grandfathers with Sunday School attendance pins? Was she writing those prayers down in a Bible?

I know the answer to the last question. The rest will have to wait until I can ask her in person.