Lumpy skeletons.

A woman in my congregation recently lost her mother, suddenly. She’s been remarkably stoic about it -- philosophical, even. Possibly in denial. Probably some of both. And of course it’s easier to handle any loss when you know it’s not a permanent one.

At any rate, now that her mother has been claimed by the Other Team, she’s got the itch for family history research. Not an uncommon phenomenon, and rather therapeutic. She spent a whole day at the Family History Library taking classes on Swedish research so that she could hit the ground running. She’s a woman with a mission -- but first we have to hop her peeps back across the pond.

To that end, several weeks ago we spent a few hours at the FHL searching for naturalizations and other records that might point to the ship or to the Swedish ancestral village or to the names of the great-great-great grandparents who stayed behind in the old country. In the process of digging through U.S. records we learned that one of her great-great uncles fought in the Union Army. She was delighted with this connection because, she said, she had been 100% sure all her family were a sad and uninspired lot back to the beginning of time. She clearly wasn’t joking -- this was how she saw her clan, and it had become her personal myth. Finding great-great Uncle Andrew doing noble things back in the 1860s was meaningful to her and gave her hope for the rest of the family story that she was soon to uncover and that part she will go on to live herself.

Let no one say that a tortured family history is an imaginary obstacle. Not insurmountable, but very real.

We didn’t find what she’d been looking for on that research outing and she’s been crazy-busy lately. Because I have time (and obsession) I did some index searches to see if there was an obituary for her great-great grandfather, with the thought that it could be traveling to us through the mail while we wait for her schedule to clear again. Maybe the obituary, if one existed, would have some clues in it that would help us in our next library expedition.

A couple weeks ago I did find an obituary listed in an index. Or rather, I found not an obituary reference, but a reference to a regular news article.

Her great-great-grandfather committed suicide.

No

No

NO!

I haven’t yet mustered the nerve to tell her that her immigrant ancestor killed himself. Maybe I’ll wait to see what exactly the article says. Maybe I should show it to her if it contains information that could direct her research back to Sweden, but hide it from her otherwise? That’s research blasphemy, of course. Or maybe I should hide it from her until the sting of her mother’s death is a bit more muted? Or hide it from her until she’s found a few more uplifting family stories to balance it out?

I’ve known people who have triumphed over generations of inherited pain and can look back on their dark family stories with compassion and hope rather than anxiety or disgust. But does timing also need to be considered as we approach difficult truths? And even if that’s the case, who am I to set the pace?

What if there had been no record of his suicide left behind? (His death record doesn’t mention how he died.) Would he, wherever he is, have been happier letting his great-great-granddaughter believe incorrectly that he’d led a normal happy-sad life and died a natural death? It is quite possible that he’s now worked through his turmoil and would like to put his death behind him. And if he’d been a few generations more distant he would have died before the era of widespread newspapers and so the details surviving about his death would likely have been blissfully boring -- little more than a date and place on a pedigree chart. Sometimes adding flesh to the skeletons is exciting, and sometimes we wish we could turn them back into skeletons. I wish for her sake that I could turn her great-great grandfather back into a skeleton.

And I fear that this is how hardened genealogical criminals begin -- manipulating the facts to make life seem rosier.

I'll give her the obituary. Eventually.