The Family Tree

Photo by benotforgot

The late novelist Michael Crichton is reported to have said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

Historians ought to be . . .

Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction to the present, and monitor to the future. - Cervantes.

Unvisited Tombs

And now having inscribed this brief record, I realize how difficult it is to write history.


A few names have been mentioned,
a few dates noted,
but how many threads must be dropped,
how many facts unwritten,
how many persons forgotten.

Faces vanish,
voices are hushed,
footsteps heard no more.

It may be events important in their results,
names potent for good or ill,
have found no place in this simple story . . .

And we deeply feel the truth of that beautiful saying of George Eliot:

The growing good of the world
is partly dependent on unhistoric acts;
and that things are not so ill
with you and me
as they might have been,
is half owing to the number
who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs.

Charles P. Kane (1850-1918)

The Life of our Ancestors

Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history. Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

Gone

The following poem was found in his typewriter on the morning of the 1940 death of the original cowboy poet, Lysius Gough . . .

The Old T-Anchor Ranch is gone, and with it the open range,
No more we'll ride the plains alone, there's been a mighty change.

No more we'll round the circle wide, in early Spring and Fall,
Or stamp T-Anchor on the hide and hear the yearlin's bawl.

No more we'll trail T-Anchor herds to Fort Reno and "Montan,"
or hear the drawling campfire words, nor wear the trail brown-tan.

We've seen cowboys in their prime, and the ranch in all its glory,
Now some have crossed the line and others bald and hoary.

May the T-Anchor Ranch in memory live through all the coming years,
And our deeds strong courage give to future youth and steers.

---

Reminiscing . . .

Many changes more have been,
in one life's fleeting span,
brought about by sturdy men,
who never failed to duty stand.

Historians, to thee this charge we give,
write for us three cherished words,
let them through future ages live,
cowboys, cutting horse, and herd. . . .

Judge Lysius Gough
29 July 1862 ~ 02 November 1940

cowboypoetry.com
findagrave.com
tshaonline.org

Tombstone Tuesday :: Seated on an old grave

I now write these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a century since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations. 

Fifty and more graves are quite plainly traceable and as many more decay’d out of all form - depress’d mounds, crumbled and broken stones, cover’d with moss - the gray and sterile hill, the clumps of chestnuts outside, the silence, just varied by the soughing wind. 

There is always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any of these ancient graveyards of which Long Island has so many; so what must this one have been to me? 

My whole family history with its successions of links, from the first settlements down to date, told here - three centuries concentrated on this sterile acre.” -- Walt Whitman (1819-1892) from Specimen Days

Flag Day 1917

This postcard from my private collection is postmarked June 20, 1917. On June 14, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave the following speech in honor of Flag Day.





This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours.

It floats in majestic silence above the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace or in war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us, speaks to us of the past, of the men and women who went before us, and of the records they wrote upon it.

We celebrate the day of its birth; and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great people.

Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nation.

We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a new luster. Once more we shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our people.

An Arundel Tomb

An Arundel Tomb by dyhecht

These are the tombs of Earl Richard Fitzalan (1306-1376) and Countess Eleanor de Lancaster (1318-1372), who are currently believed to be my 22nd (via Richard) & 23rd (via Alice) & 24th (via Joan) great-grandparents. Today, the 5th day of February, is the anniversary of the day they married . . . in 1345 . . . at Ditton Church in Buckinghamshire, England.



An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Phillip Larkin