The Box

On Tuesdays, I arrive at work by eight, unpack my glasses, water and tea, and log onto my computer to begin the day. On this particular Tuesday, I got an email from a parcel carrier notifying me that my item would be arriving by three that day. I hadn't ordered anything (had I?). I wasn't sure if Micki or our eldest son had, so I disregarded the message. Soon I was lost in the vicissitudes of the workday.

By quitting time, I had forgotten all about that email. I was mentally tired and ready to let the dogs out and be “home Dave”. That's when I noticed that there was a cardboard box on our front stoop. I brought it in and placed it on the dining room table. When Micki arrived and, after we exchanged welcome homes, I mentioned to her that a large something had been delivered. “Who is it for,” she asked. “Not sure,” I replied. 

During the fall and winter, when our daughter-in-law and granddaughter were staying with us, we encouraged her to use my name when having her orders shipped to our house to avoid confusion. So, for months, boxes of diapers and baby snacks and her beloved Manga novels all arrived at our doorstep addressed to Yours Truly but intended for someone else. This had the somewhat unwelcome effect of desensitizing me to deliveries with my name on them since they were rarely for me.

With this in mind, after we deposited our work gear and got the pups sorted, I took a closer look at the mysterious object. To my slight surprise, it was addressed to me, though that might not mean anything. I could not read the return address which had been smudged or worn away. Okay, I thought, moment of truth. So, I dug out my trusty pocket knife and carefully cut the neatly taped seams. The stout box eventually gave way to my deft blade and I pried it apart. Within was a large, rectangular shape shrouded in heavy bubble wrap. Returning my knife to my hip pocket, I withdrew the wrapped object and set it on our dining room table, and removed the packing media.

Inside was a box of dark-stained wood. A foot long, front to back, and nine inches wide, it stood about five inches tall and was obviously handmade and very old. Toward the front of the top section was a carved indent that one could use to slide the lid open. I cautiously slid it forward, hoping each moment that I wasn't about to be blown to bits by a complex and handsomely made nail or ball-bearing bomb. It has happened before to others, but I was too invested to stop.

Within was a mound of folded papers and small notebooks with an envelope topmost addressed to me. I opened the envelope warily. The handwriting immediately soothed my jangling nerves. Here was the fine script of my good aunt explaining the provenance of the box. It had been given to her by her Uncle Elmer Gephart, my paternal grandmother's (and my good aunt’s mother’s) elder brother. The box had been Uncle Elmer’s grandfather's, a man called Alexander Zimmerman. Aunt MJ had scratched out a small family tree from Alexander down to my brother, me, and our cousins. After reading and re-reading, I set her card aside and started to stumble through the contents of the box. 

I made only a preliminary foray. The box was full of old check stubs, deeds, small tables, or ledger books. In these pocket notebooks were folded bits of paper, either receipts handwritten in sprawling 19th Century script, or neat numbers showing deductions from a starting amount. I gently unfolded one paper that was a summons from the sheriff to a minor hearing to attest to something which is as yet undeciphered, but it looked serious.

I found another small piece of paper upon which was written “The barn burned down on June 16th, at twenty minutes of four oclock (sic). Jennie W. Gephart, 1920”, in green ink. On the other side, the same message in thinner black ink, less scrawled. The Jennie in the note was Great Aunt Jennie—my grandmother's older sister. That the barn had burned down was a tale that has become legendary in the family’s oral tradition. Until now, though it had no fixed point in history. I was holding in my hand evidence of its veracity and significance to a woman who was in her nineties when I was but a lad.

Among much else, there was a small, folding fabric envelope complete with an advertisement encouraging farmers to buy better fertilizer inscribed on it. Slid into one of the pockets of the envelope was a bank book complete with a register to keep one's investments and expenditures carefully balanced. There were other treasures, too. Several pocket-sized notebooks with swirling, colorful covers were partially filled with notes and numbers but were largely empty. In this, I began to see a commonality with my own stash of unfilled notebooks. Here an intention, there a reminder, bits of receipts folded and smaller notes tucked away, but otherwise generally empty. They had been started with good intentions and were thrust in the breast pocket of a jacket that was hung on a hook in the closet, was restlessly sought for, and finally replaced with another nickel notebook. Both were later found and placed in this box with all the other items of significance. This mental picture played through my head in seconds and was familiar enough to make me realize that these same tendencies in myself are echoes of my ancestor, long gone and yet living in my DNA, whose possessions I was rifling in my dining room 150 years on.

I spent the rest of that evening captive to a hereditary chain dragging at my heart. This box had in it an entire, though fragmented history, compiled and stored, waiting to be sorted and made sense of. That my good aunt had sent it to me filled me with a sense of honor and gratitude that I could not, at that moment, properly process. Here I was, the recipient of my great-great-grandfather's box of papers which had opened a wormhole from his time to my own. Gazing into this tear in spacetime, I could see the old farm, the steep hills and dusty lanes winding away into hazy, sepia-toned tintypes of the generations that had gone before. These papers and notebooks were stored in this box against some future date when they might be required as proof of this or that payment or debt. They had lain, stored in the old farmhouse,  and then passed to his son-in-law (my grandmother’s father) and then to his son, Uncle Elmer, and finally to my good aunt who had kept it for decades, to arrive in my possession last week.

I have had some experience with historical documents over the years and I knew how to proceed, at least in part. This was not the first batch of genealogical information that my good aunt has sent me. The entire Bare file in our Randolph Room has been filled with information that she has forwarded to me over the years. Because the librarians and historians in the library’s genealogical library and archive—called the Randolph Room—have more experience with such things, I went to them to share about the box and I was gratified to find that they were very interested to see it. 

Micki suggested that it would be good to ask them about the kind of folders and envelopes and sleeves that might help to protect the documents. As I reflected on their worth as an anchor to our family history, I not only wanted to preserve them, but I also wanted to carefully catalog the contents. Prudence demands that I pull out each item, carefully unfold it, and log it in a notebook so that, at any point in the future, everything in it can be tracked. Someday, this box will be handed to another member of the family and I want to have contributed to its provenance, in the same way my good aunt has done for me.

The Randolph Room librarians will come in handy because they understand what some of the documents are and they can also help me to decipher the writing. The head librarian in the Randolph Room (and a friend for many years) has uncanny skill for reading old handwriting and helped our library director to translate a series of journals for his book. Although I once prided myself on the ability to emulate the writing of former ages, my eye and brain are not trained to read it with equal skill.

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As the prince of Denmark and his only true friend are walking through a churchyard, they come across a gravedigger digging a grave. As the man plunges his spade into the dirt, he casts up several skulls. Hamlet, in reflective mood, asks Horatio, 

“There’s another. Why may not that be the skull of a
lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his
cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer
this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a
dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of
battery? Hum! This fellow might be in ’s time a great
buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his
fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the
fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries,
to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his
vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double
ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of
indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will
hardly lie in this box, and must the inheritor himself
have no more, ha?”

The honest Horatio responds with, “Not a jot more, my lord.” Hamlet’s point is simple. In life, documents like deeds and vouchers, which have meaning in themselves, also help to give us a sense of meaning and permanence. Our ledgers, our taxes, our bank statements, and appraisals all seem to give significance to the question of why we are here. Shakespeare’s genius in the scene was to use the gravedigger as a counterpoint to these illusory realities. Eventually, as the scriptures say, we return to dust. The papers and deals and debts and credits matter little to the skull “knocked about” with the sexton’s spade. As Hamlet meditates on this fact, we see the futility of the busy occupations of our lives.

In the context of my great-great-grandfather’s box, I felt a similar realization. These documents were of incredible import to him. They were likely of incredible value to his children, too. What was once so valuable and important to him as proof of legal ownership or a testament to money owed or earned is now an heirloom in my house. Their only real value can be calculated by the concrete evidence they provide in showing that the past generations lived and worked and loved and hurt and eventually died with fears and cares all their own, in some cases based on the papers in the box.

My father and his siblings, their remaining cousins, their children (and my cousins) are heirlooms of sorts, too. We are genetic proof of those who came before. Our combined memories contain keystones of experience that have been exchanged in common remembrances between all of us. Whether my father or my aunt or my grandmother did the telling, I keep the stories in my memory, knowing that they are a picture of our shared heritage. The box and its contents, for me, represent a tangible anchor that rests in family history and stretches all the way to me, an unknown scion of my twice great-grandfather, who may have been kind to my grandmother, who, in her turn, was gentle and caring with me (in her brusque way). I have been found worthy to take on the custody of the documents that formed the foundation of the reality that she took for granted as family and heritage. I did not know that they existed until last week. This week, I feel a strengthening connection to my heritage that I can barely express.

Much must be done. Preserving and cataloging the documents is just the beginning. Copies must be made, where they can be done safely so that the Bare file can be expanded. Future generations (I hope) will want to know where they come from and who came before. They will want to experience the strange sensation that I have felt again and again, of finding physical evidence of people who only existed in stories passed down around a kitchen or dining room table over pie and coffee. It is an amazing feeling to have proof that these were real people with worries, concerns, fears, hopes, dreams, joys and interests all their own, no different than we have. Their world was different, in some ways impossibly hard compared to my era. They lived and through their lives and their choices, subsequent generations were born and grew older. It is true for every family, but it is unarguably true for this one. I have the proof.

As I pull open the box again and begin trying to put its contents into some kind of order, my heart is full. My mind is thrown back into the mists of my heritage, but it is also cast into the obscure future. Maybe someday, some child or grandchild or great-grandchild will have a philosophical and literary bent and not know where it comes from. They may be fascinated by history in general and family history specifically. Along with an ancient steamer trunk full of half-filled notebooks, pictures, and favorite books, they may find a handmade slide-top box. Opening it they might discover a note from a distant ancestor, whose bones, much like the skulls in Hamlet’s churchyard, have long been moldering in the earth. I hope that they might feel, as I have felt, a thin but strong chain, leading them back to my own life and to the lives of those who came before that make up our family tree. If they do, they will find a cast of characters whose fragmented histories will fill in gaps in their own lives, and explain quirks, tendencies, preferences, pet peeves and drives. As they comb through the documents, they will be drawn into the mists of the past and learn about the family, and the box will continue to be an anchor to the ones who came before.