52 Ancestors #1: Burrie / No one is a secluded island

[“52 Ancestors,” posting about one person per week over the course of 2014, is being done by a number of genealogy bloggers. I’m participating in an attempt to finally start blogging a minimum of once a week here. As usual with my blogging, I’m a bit late in my first post. While I can’t speak for others, I am choosing to interpret “ancestors” more broadly than the dictionary definition, in keeping with my general posts here. Those of you on Twitter can see many more posts from this theme on the hashtag #52Ancestors.]

Burrie was the uncle I never knew. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor as an infant, and my grandparents spent the next four years watching him slowly die. Many, many children have passed through history leaving no trace at all, but in addition to having heard his memory honored by people who knew him since I was a child, I have a rather inordinate amount of documentation on Burrie: I have inherited a number of photos of him, some of his medical records, and a letter my grandmother wrote to one of his doctors shortly after he died, in addition to the “outside” documentary evidence I have collected in my research.

Burrie as an infant, probably before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Through the documents I inherited, I know that Burrie had a brain tumor unlike any his doctors had ever seen and that he died with them still unsure what it was, and that the brain tumor seemed to impact his ability to grasp what was happening to him, so that despite his physical suffering, he was a bright and happy child. My grandmother’s letter to the doctor says that he stayed this way till his last day of life in the hospital, after they had decided that there was no point in trying any further operations, and that she firmly believed he passed peacefully into death never fully having understood what was happening. The photos I have inherited of him support her belief: They show a brightly smiling child with frizzy blond hair.

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I chose to start “52 Ancestors” with Burrie partly because I firmly believe that part of genealogical and other historical research is to do our best to document those that have passed through history leaving little to no trace. While Burrie is well-remembered within my family, no one in my generation of first cousins in this branch has living descendants yet and there is a fair possibility that our branch may die out, like so many other branches before ours, and someday this post may be the best source on Burrie’s life in the dash between his too-close-together birth and death dates.

I also chose to start “52 Ancestors” with Burrie because I just-as-firmly believe that none of us are an isolated island. I can’t think of anyone without thinking of how they impacted and interacted with those around them and with larger history. We are all islands in an archipelago, the river of history moving swiftly and unstoppably around us as its waves lap, and sometimes crash upon, our shores. When Burrie died, something inside my grandmother was extinguished, as if a candle had been snuffed out. I don’t have a single picture of her after Burrie’s death where she smiles the way she did when he was still alive. Many argue that back in “the olden days” infants died so much more often that people became inured to it and didn’t emotionally invest in their children like people today. Frankly, I think that is a load of bull. To me, a simple rebuttal is the many colonial cemeteries where I have walked and viewed intricately carved (and consequently expensive) gravestones that echo the parents’ grief down through the centuries, often with multiple children listed on a single gravestone, sometimes having died within days of each other.

During Burrie’s short life, he had one surviving grandmother, and I can’t think of him without thinking of her and wondering how his life and death impacted her, answers that I do not have. I have the tendency to essentialize my great-grandmother’s life to the string of tragedies she endured, to the grief that I imagine must have been amplified each time a new tragedy happened.

When Burrie died, it had been 35 years since a year that contained a string of tragedies: Her husband had committed suicide (see my post “The life and death of my great-grandfather”), her uncle who had murdered her father also committed suicide, and her uncle’s widow had collapsed and died, which the papers alleged was from grief over her husband’s suicide: “HEART FAILED,” one headline screamed with modern-tabloid sensibility, and she “Whose Husband Killed Himself, Dropped Dead While Shopping.”  Seventeen years earlier the aforementioned murder had occurred, and years before that, when my great-grandmother was a teenager, she had lost her mother to illness. Of course, all of these events impacted many more people than just my great-grandmother, and this is meant to be illustrative, not all-inclusive.

My great-grandmother died just two years after Burrie, having lived a life that spanned over 21 times the years as his. But how long someone lived doesn’t make them more important than someone else, just more likely to be remembered long after their death. My great-grandmother and Burrie experienced dramatically different lives and left very different legacies in the world. But they both lived, and they both left legacies.

I inherited a number of framed photos in addition to many, many loose ones; these included small photos of Burrie and of my other great-grandmother. These two photos sit beside each other on top of one of my bookcases in their vintage frames, out of sunlight and away from fluctuating temperatures. I like to think of them as an encapsulation of why I do genealogical and other historical research.

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“The world breaks everyone and afterward

many are strong at the broken places.

But those that will not break it kills.

It kills the very good and the very gentle

and the very brave impartially.”

Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms