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PREFACE FOR ONLINE READERS
This "Saga" was written over a three-week period in December 2005 as a Christmas present to my children Sarah (then age 16) and Tim (then 12). It takes the form of a long descriptive letter, personal narration, and unfolding detective story about my ancestors. I commenced to write wholly innocent of commercial genealogy services like Ancestry.com. The old family history files had gathered dust for many years, and in the specific field of genealogy I was rather a novice.
Novice detectives make mistakes, and the many I made are left as written. The point was not to produce a definitive account of my ancestry, but rather, to try to create a compelling story about my ancestors for my kids for Christmas. The extent to which this effort met any degree of success is theirs alone to judge.
Such were the contexts of this text's production.
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The Awesomely Gripping Saga of the
SCHROEDER-DELEHANTY-SULLIVAN-KINSMAN
FAMILY HISTORY
A True Story of Love & Romance — Tragedy & Comedy — Drama & Adventure — Villainy & Heroism — Wisdom & Foolishness — With Exciting Escapades of Detective Derring-Do amongst a Humungous Cast of Mysterious & Intriguing Characters Going Back 447 Years (to 1558)
A Gift for Sarah and Tim
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© Michael J. Schroeder
Christmas 2005
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THIS IS THE STORY of my family history, mainly on my mother's side. It's also a kind of detective story, because it tells about my efforts to uncover that history. Why do I care? Mainly because I'm curious about my ancestors, because I like doing this kind of detective work, and because I love my mother and grandmother so very much, may the Creator rest their souls. And because I love you so much, too. I guess it's a kind of memorial to them, a way to honor their memory, and a way of trying to pass their memory on to you.
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My mom and grandma's overall approach to life was pretty simple, really. Life's basic purpose, they believed, was to love other people. Not very complicated. It might even sound easy. But in fact it is the exact opposite of easy. Truly loving another person can be the riskiest, the most dangerous, the most incredibly difficult act any human being ever undertakes. Why? Because it means opening yourself up to the possibility of excruciating pain and suffering.
What if the person you love dies? What if they become sick or diseased, or suffer an accident, or grow old and incapacitated, or go off to war? What if they say their goodbyes, walk out the door, and never come back? The risk, the danger of truly loving another person is that your love will turn into grief – a horrible, aching grief that pierces your heart all the way to your bones. Truly loving another can be a very painful – no, an infinitely painful thing.
It also can be infinitely wondrous. A source of infinite joy, or at least as much infinity as we mortals can take. That's the flip side of love. It's the food, the fuel, the energy of the human spirit, because without it, the human spirit just withers and dies. Think about it. It is not much more complicated than that.
Why is the universe made this way? Why is the most wonderful thing in life also the most dangerous and difficult thing in life? Who knows? Why is water wet? Because it just is.
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I remember so clearly the all-encompassing love of my mother and grandmother. It's such a palpable part of my memories of childhood. So, part of what these pages try to unravel is the history of that impulse – that notion – that bedrock belief that we're put here on this Earth to love other people. Where did that impulse come from? What is its genealogy? That, as much as biological ancestry, is what I hope to discover, uncover, and share with you here.
People are not born knowing how to throw a ball, or tie their shoes, or read a book, or actually do anything – except breathe and cry, sleep and squirm, pee and poop, and suckle at their mother's breast. Everything else they learn by practicing it, over and over, till they get it right. Why should love be any different? People aren't born knowing how to love. They learn how to love. Sometimes they learn on their own, but more often they're taught when they're little by those who love them. Then they grow up and pass that knowledge on to the next generation of little ones – their own children and grandchildren, or their nieces, or nephews, or friends' children – whomever becomes part of their real family, their circle of love.
Psychologists will tell you that a person's fundamental emotional makeup is firmly established by the time they reach their fifth birthday. The early childhood years of 0-5 are absolutely crucial for the formation of a person's sense of self. If small children are loved and nurtured, if they are surrounded by kindness and trust and affection, the chances good are that they will go on to become kind, trusting, loving, warm, nurturing adults. If they are taught to believe in themselves and care about others, the chances are good they will believe in themselves and care about others for the rest of their lives.
Chances are. It doesn't always work out that way, of course. Sometimes kids absorb the lessons they're being taught, and sometimes those lessons bounce off without making a dent. Sometimes kids are showered with nothing but love and affection and grow up to be malicious trouble-makers. Other times they are neglected or abused and grow up to be deeply loving and caring. It just depends. On what? On a million things – their inborn personality and predispositions, the circumstances of their upbringing, their will and desire to learn, chance encounters, traumatic events, changing brain chemistry – on more things than you can shake a stick at, as my mom would say.
But despite the incredible variety of factors that go into the making of a human being, there are strong patterns that endure generation after generation. Take my family, for instance. It is my strong hunch – my hypothesis, if you will – that tracing my mother's side of the family back in time will show that each generation of child-rearers experienced an early childhood filled with the deepest love and affection, and that they grew up to pass on that love and affection to the next generation. That's why most of these pages are devoted to my mother's side of the family. They carry the most lessons. Plus, as it turns out, that's where most of the purely genealogical mysteries lie (that is, the ancestral-biological mysteries).
I hope you read it. I hope you enjoy reading it. I'm sorry it's so long – I didn't have time to make it shorter. I should warn you, it's not finished. A project like this takes years. There are many paths unexplored, many puzzles unsolved, many loose ends left dangling. Also, there are photos I want to include, maps, charts, copies of letters, all kinds of things. There's a lot left to do.
I don't expect you to care about all the details, though I hope you do – if not now, maybe at some point in your lives. I also hope you consider this little book a family heirloom. Because if you're not interested, maybe your children or grandchildren, or your nieces or nephews, or your spouses or step-kids, or their cousins or grandkids, or someone else in that big, wide, deep, always changing, always rock-solid group of people who love and care for each other – your family – will be. That's the hope, anyway.
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A few words about how this book was created. The research was basically undertaken in two different periods, separated by 15 years or so. The first was in 1989-1990, right after my mom died. My brother Tom and I got curious, dug around a bit, and gathered together some death certificates, obituaries, and other documents. In the fall of 1989, when you were just a baby, Sarah, your mom and I visited Burr Oak, Michigan, where I poked around a little more. I also wrote to my mom's surviving friends and relatives and asked them to share whatever they remembered. Tom and I traced our ancestry back to 1860s before we hit a dead end.
Then I wrote up the results in a little booklet that I gave to my siblings. This was Christmas 1989. The next year, during a trip to the National Archives, I found the Civil War files of two of my great-grandfathers, photocopied everything, and filed it all away.
And there things sat, gathering dust, for the next 15 years. Then, a couple of weeks ago (on Thursday, December 8, 2005, at 7:35 p.m., to be exact), I got the notion to revisit this unfinished family history. It occurred to me that writing it all up afresh might make a nice Christmas present for you. So I dusted off all the old files and started digging around again.
I started writing, and hit the same dead ends as before. Soon it became a real puzzle, a real mystery, and few things are more engrossingly fun than trying to solve a really good, really challenging puzzle. Also, in the meantime something called the Internet was invented. Actually, the World Wide Web. It's a pretty amazing thing, really. You should check it out. So now I had access to tons more information than Tom and I did 15 years before. So I wrote what I knew, and I dug for what I didn't know. And I wrote and I dug, and I dug as I wrote. I got lots of help, too, from a very kind lady. Gradually, in fits and starts, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together.
This little book – part genealogy, part real-life detective story, part act of remembrance, all act of love – is the result. It tells the history of my family, my version of it at least, and the story of how part of that history was uncovered during a snowy December in 2005.
Anyway, enough introduction already. Merry Christmas!
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toC • Intro • Book I • Book ii • book iii • book iv • book v