‘The tide that carries us farther and farther away from our beginning in times is also the tide that turns and carries us back again” – Buechner.
Be warned, I was told. There may be too many skeletons in that family’s closet. Stories of womanizing and molestation have been whispered for years. Lots of shame and pain in this dusty old cupboard. And it all started with one man, my great grandfather, who left foreign lands, to come to Australia. His migration is not so ancient at all, but a mystery. And, I want to know from where and why, did he come?
Last month, I opened the well aired cupboards of my father’s ancestors. I can trace back his forefathers, to their Australian arrival in the 1800s. This much was easy. Someone else has brought theirs stories to light. Their families came from a village in Prussia, now located within the borders of modern-day Poland. They were among a wave of migrants to sail to South Australia in the mid-1800s. They were German, but not actually from Germany. Their steadfast faith in God, and their determination for religious freedom, meant whole families sold up, to flee both Prussia and persecution. Migration allowed these Old Lutherans to worship freely on the foreign soil of Australia.
But I am more than my father’s daughter. I am also my mother’s. And it is in one of my mother’s family closet that dwells a few dusty, old skeletons. She had started to look but did not finish the work. She died a premature death. One, I attribute to the trauma of unhealed sins hidden in one of those closets. I found photos, and some photocopied notes. And remembered stories about different times. Stories about relatives I never met. Some of them not very nice at all.
In a bid to fill in the gaps, I signed up for one particular, online ancestry database. I am among ninety-eight million people in the world, who have done the same. Why, all of a sudden, am I so curious about my family tree? Is it because I am closer to my death date, than my birth. Perhaps it is as Frederick Buechner says, the older we grow, the more we find ourselves returning to the days when we were young. And for me, it is returning to those stories I heard around cups of tea, at my grandfather’s knee.
It turns out this skeleton is also German. But, may be not as noble as the others. Many questions remain unanswered. And, I am more curious than ever. I am full of questions about the shadows and bones in this particular closet. Questions like, why did my great grandfather migrate to Australia? Was it to avoid military service in his motherland of Germany? Like so many of the young men of his time, was he too at odds with the increasing militarization of their country. Or was it opportunity, and a free passage paid by the government of Queensland? Did he leave behind parents and siblings too? What did they think about him leaving them? Great Granddaddy, how did you handle being vilified by your neighbours, only a decade later, when the Germans became Australia’s enemy? If the dates are true, then you also carried the shame of fathering your first child before you said your marriage vows to Great Grandma. Did you love her? And why, oh why, did some of your sons turn out that way?
My pop was born into this family. I don’t remember him being anything like his brothers were purported to be. Perhaps he did have a little charming rogue in him, as they most certainly did. But then his world was turned upside down by the disease of Diabetes type one, diagnosed in his twenties. He would have been a child of a German, during World War One. And a husband and father with a German name during World War Two. He faced the prejudice of both ethnicity and disability, as well as the challenges of the Great Depression. Work for Pop I heard, was hard to find, and even harder to hold down; especially when a diabetic coma threatened regularly. He found work in pineapple farms and cutting timber; none of which where permanent careers. He and my Nan relied on the generosity of family, and often sought accommodation on family land.
I only knew my pop, as a tottering elder living with our family. In some places his teeth were jagged; in others none. He sipped tea with me, and preferred his biscuits, first dunked, and mushy done. I remember him with flyway white hair, and falling pants hitched up with a piece of bailing twine. He often had a twinkle in his eye, and up for a yarn. Charming is how I remember him. But truly, only eyes for his Rita, my Nan…and me too, when I came for tea.
He didn’t talk all that much about the other brothers. They made my Nan uncomfortable, and one brought shame and suffering to my mother. Do I really want to go there, and dig up their stories? When, other closets are swept clean, with fewer skeletons.
What good does it do, to go rummaging through the past, and search dark places for the broken pieces and secrets. Will it help bringing them into the light? Will it help telling their stories? Tread carefully, I hear. For now, I shed tears vicariously, for lost hopes and lost lives, all due to the complex migration history of one man, who’s DNA I carry. What do I do with this tide that has carried me to distant stories, and skeletons long buried? Does anyone want to hear these? Or do I leave them to float away again, to the distant shores they came from?
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