Death certificates

Through a number of coincidences and lucky happenings, I came into possession of a number of digitized copies of documents pertaining to the history of my family. My maternal grandfather was the first of his siblings to be born in the United States, and his family is the closest link that I have to something of the realm of euro imagination and speculation.

The documents include such things that my mother had possessed in one form or another at some time, the death certificates of her great-grandparents and census records from 1920 and 1930. My acquisitions also include the passenger records from the ship that first brought my great-grandfather across and then from the ship that brought his wife and my grandfather's two older siblings.

Though the underlying story is hardly unusual, these documents lead me to marvel at the personal qualities of my forbears. My great-grandfather came across in 1904. My mother's oldest first cousin says that he had training as a carpenter in Holland before he returned to Hungary and met my great-grandmother, but in the new world he was a laborer. By 1910 he had saved enough money to send for his wife and two children in style by buying them a state room on a ship. What must it have taken for him to cross the ocean at the age of 26, leaving behind a wife with one child and another on the way? What was my great-grandmother like to have left her tiny village with two small children, ages 4 and 6 in tow, illiterate even in her own language? What type of steel did she posses to have gone first to Italy to get a boat and when turned away then traveled to Germany where they finally boarded the President Lincoln in Hamburg bound for this promised land so far away?

As I muse on their fortitude, my own struggles and demons seem so small in comparison. I think of how they came here so that I, and the other hundred or so of their great-grandchildren, might have my own struggles and opportunities, so unlike theirs.

In reading through the blanks of my great-grandfather's death certificate from 1926, I am also struck by the equanimity of death. Here was a man, as brave in my imagination as any fictional hero, dead at the age of 50 from a stomach cancer which had apparently plagued him for 10 years. "Occupation: Labor working in stone quarry." How did he continue working in a stone quarry for a decade with such an ailment? How did he buy a house and 4 acres of land for his family while working in such a lowly job?

There is a juxtaposition here I would like to make. Another great-grandfather of mine was a veterinarian in rural Indiana, another was a state senator and physician and another an English teacher and local politician. Despite their worldly status, each of their exits were marked by just such a document to be remembered by those succeeding generations who might take such scant clues to wonder about the character of each man. Though the others left far more written documentation of their lives and were shown far more worldly appreciation that this one, yet somehow my mind returns to this brave and mysterious man again and again. Bravery shown by scant facts, missing details with a world of color to be filled in by those who exist because of his choices.