The "hints" also contain suggestions pointing to other family trees on ancestry.com. I've looked at some of those trees from time to time, but it simply hadn't occurred to me that other people might be being pointed to my tree as well, even though I haven't made the contents of the tree broadly available.
So I was taken rather aback some months ago to find the following note in the email section of my ancestry.com account:
"I am just building my family tree for the first time on ancestry and am wondering if the Audrey McCabe in your tree is my grandmother Dagmar McCabe's sister?"Well, as they used to say, "Ye gods and little fishes!" I knew that the censuses for 1900 and 1910 had included a sister for Jane's grandmother Audrey. The writing was blotched in one census, leaving a name that looked like "Degnan," but in the other one, it was clearly Dagmar. I had been so focused on tracing Jane's grandmother that I simply hadn't followed the trail of her sister—although I will say in my own defense that following young women who marry and change their names isn't always easy.
I wrote back to my correspondent, whose name is Julie, saying that if her grandmother was the daughter of Frank and Matilda Christensen McCabe, originally of the Danish West Indies, then she was at the right place and that I was practically dumbstruck to have heard from that branch of the family.
Julie replied that her great-grandparents were indeed Frank and Matilda Christensen McCabe from the Danish West Indies and that her mother and aunt had told her that Great-grandmother Matilda was known as "Cabey" and that she loved opera! Julie further explained that it was primarily her aunt who was deeply curious about their West Indian ancestry and who had urged her to research it. That was how she ended up at ancestry.com and thence, at our family tree.
Some long emails and a few phone calls later, I had more pieces of the family puzzle: Jane's grandmother's sister Dagmar (same name as her mother) spent her entire life in New York City, where she married and raised two daughters, both of whom earned advanced degrees and lived lives of accomplishment. "Dagmar Jr." had passed away in 2001 at the incredible age of 101, and appeared to be full of life until the very end. She was memorialized at Riverside Church on Manhattan's West Side.
Of course, my interest was in the mystery surrounding Jane's grandmother's having become a "non-person." Julie replied that Jane's grandmother was not a part of their lives either and that she never really understood completely why. There were muffled murmurs of a long institutionalization for mental illness.
Because of my questions, Julie thought it would be wonderful if we could meet her aunt, who had actually known Jane's grandmother. I thought it would be wonderful, too—in fact, I nearly wept at the thought of meeting someone who actually knew the person we had been looking for for so long—and was ready to go to New York as soon as a meeting could be arranged.
But then another thump: there was a deep reservoir of resentment about the fate of Jane's grandmother—a strong sense that she had been abandoned by her husband and daughters. That resentment remained so strong in Julie's aunt that she declined to meet with us. She didn't want to revisit that anger and that pain.
The reasons surrounding this perceived abandonment were not completely clear even to Julie, much less to us. Certainly, intractable mental illnesses continue to tear families apart. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the social stigma was even more intense: the subject was simply unmentionable. A family member who was more-or-less permanently institutionalized for mental illness very often became a "non-person."
There is also the possibility that Jane's mother's decision to leave her African-American heritage behind, i.e., to "pass," may have played some part in Jane's grandmother's destabilization, too.
The dynamics of "passing" in our culture are such that many who do so must maintain a charade in an attempt to deny or otherwise obliterate any trace of a past that might give them away. For those with African-American ancestry, there might be tales of South American ancestry or maybe Sicilian—anything to account for a darker complexion except of course for the truth. There certainly can be no dark-skinned relatives lurking, although if the photo in my previous post is indeed her mother, she does not appear to have been very dark,
So what to make of all this? We know so little, and even if we did know more facts, that would still not substitute for walking a mile or ten in the other person's shoes. We don't know why Jane's mother made the choices she did; we do have a small but true glimpse of what those choices cost her.
At the same time, out of all that pain came something extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful:
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| Jane and Jake. Cornell University, 24 May 2015. |
Amen.
Amen, indeed!
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