You Have To Know Where You Come From To Know Where You Are Going

There are some bits of knowledge that you just seem to know. You don’t remember where or how you learned them, they just seem to have been there forever. That is how I came to know my father’s father. For as long as I can remember, I just knew that he had been killed shortly before my dad was born. When I was a small child no one ever really spoke of the man, my grandfather. Later, I gleaned more of my father’s history by listening when the grown-ups talked. I found out that Dad and his older brother were raised by his grandmother. Uncle Wally was killed in WW II, but we didn’t really talk about him much either. I assumed that it was hard for my dad to talk about his brother, so I never asked about him either. Both my uncle and my grandfather were just names, that as a small child, I didn’t really associate with a face.

When I was older, I learned more about my dad’s life growing up and about the loss of his brother. It was something that I couldn’t even imagine. There was a look of pain and loss in dad’s eyes whenever Uncle Wally was mentioned. Even after all the years that had passed, my father still missed him and grieved his loss, so I never asked about him. It wasn’t worth seeing that look on Dad’s face.

At some point, I did get curious about my grandfather and asked questions about him. I was told that he died in a train accident shortly before dad was born. He had been away from home looking for work but was trying to get back home before dad’s birth. As an adult, I learned that my father had been trying to learn more about his father for most of his life. His mother had remarried and was not very close to our family or apparently very forthcoming with information for my dad about his father. At one point one of my great aunts tried to help dad track down information about his father and any possible relatives, but there were very few records. The courthouse where his parents’ marriage certificate was filed had burned down many years earlier, and no one in the small town had much recollection of his parents.

Many years later, when I learned of my father’s efforts and desire to learn about his history, I too joined the hunt for his father, my grandfather. Unlike my father’s treks through small towns in Ohio and West Virginia, I was able to do my digging via the Internet. It was the mid-1990’s and records were slowly being digitized, making more and more information available. I was certain that I was going to find Grandpa and take Dad to his father’s gravesite. It would have been as close as he ever could have come to meeting his father. And I hoped it would offer him some closure to a lifetime of questions.

In an amazing stroke of luck, I was able to find a death certificate that matched my grandfather’s name, which linked me to a funeral director in a tiny town a few hours south of us. He had gone to the accident site and held the body until next of kin could be notified. It was a long shot but I decided to phone the funeral home to see if they might somehow have any records left dating back to the 1920s. The gentleman who answered my call told me that it would have been his father who issued the death certificate. And any record from that long ago would be in their storage room. When he paused to take a breath I jumped in with more details about my father’s declining health and the fact that he had been searching for his father’s grave all of his adult life. Finding this new information would be as close as my dad had ever been to success. The man agreed to check their storage room and call me back if he found anything. After I hung up, I wondered if I would ever hear from him again and decided not to mention this latest bit of information to my dad until I was certain I had found something.

I was completely and pleasantly surprised to get a call back that afternoon from the funeral director. He said that he had a copy of the death certificate and the receipt for the transfer of the body to a funeral home in Columbus. He was kind enough to scan both documents and email them to me the same day. I learned that my great grandfather, my grandmother’s father, had paid for the transfer, but there was no information on the funeral home in Columbus or the cemetery. However, I did finally have a death certificate.

The following day I went to have coffee with my father. I told him that I had a tiny bit of news for him and related the story. Then I opened the file folder I had brought with me and handed him a copy of his father’s death certificate. He was very quiet for a minute or two. I told him that I knew it wasn’t much but I promised him I would keep looking. He got up without saying a word and wrapped his arms around me and whispered: “thank you.” Then he sat down and stared at the paper again. Finally, he looked up and me and said, “This is as close to finding him as I have ever come.” At that moment, I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop searching until we found him. This was obviously important to my dad, so now it was equally important to me.

I continued searching genealogy sites and posting requests for information. I was sure that we had relatives out there to be found and answers to uncover for my father. Sadly, my father passed away never learning anything more about his father. But I had a much better understanding of his desire to know and understand his history. After losing him, I often thought of the past and the time we had shared. I found comfort in all of the happy memories from our past. I couldn’t imagine not having those memories. Without them, my father would truly be completely gone from this world. But his memories kept him with me in my heart. Now I grieved for the loss of my father, but also for my father’s loss of his father. He had no memories of him, nothing to hold in his heart to keep him connected to his father.

I continued to search, now to find closure for both of us. Eventually, even paper documents from the early 1900s were transferred to digital records and made available on the web. Ironically, I found my grandfather’s grave in a historic cemetery in Columbus Ohio. He was buried in the same cemetery as my father’s grandparents and several aunts and uncles, but my grandfather was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. My father had driven past his grave thousands of times and never knew it. He was only a few hundred feet from him each time he visited his grandparents’ graves and yet, no one ever told him where his father had been buried. The fact that grandma’s family was not fond of Clarence must have blinded them to the desire of a young man to learn about, and somehow connect, with his father and his history. It’s a part of my family’s history that I simply can’t understand. I never knew my grandfather, but it was plain to see how important it was for my father to find him. And even though my father was gone, it remained important to me. My father taught me the importance of respecting my elders and my history. And this man was my grandfather. Nothing else mattered. He deserved our respect. Whatever he was or wasn’t, there must have been some good in him to have a son who grew up to be such a good man. And it was time for the world to know where Clarence Grady was laid to rest.

After my mother passed, my sister, brother and I all agreed that it was time to honor our grandfather. Part of moms estate, and by extension my father’s estate, was used to place a headstone on our grandfathers grave. It was time. Even though we knew almost nothing about the man, there was a connection. He had been important to our father and that made him important to us. And now anyone who walks past his grave site will know it when they read his name and the inscription, “father and grandfather, unknown but loved.”

I believe with all of my heart that my father finally found his father when he left us and this world. I picture the moment that they met and how happy they both are to finally be together. I hope that my father is pleased to see that we showed the proper respect to Grandpa and that even though we never met him, he lives on in our hearts. It is a love and a connection that was passed on to us from our father because that is all he ever had. It is a part of our history and a part of our family and without it, we would not be the people who we are today.