Ancestors Read Online Free

facts they supplied him with were jumbled. Or mystifying. Or irrelevant. In order to get the information he needed, he’d have had to devote years of his life to poring over old records and church registers—years that it turned out he did not have. In his early forties he developed Buerger’s disease, which is defined in the medical dictionary as an inflammation of the innermost wall of a blood vessel, with a clot formation. It is a form of gangrene, and it occurs generally in the lower arteries and veins of the leg. It is an allergy, related to chain-smoking. My gentle, kind cousin stoically endured the amputation of a leg, and was thought to be out of danger when a new clot formed.
    At some point during his illness he and his mother were reconciled. It would have been monstrous of her to go on holding the past against him when he had no future. She stopped grieving because he did not love her and grieved instead over the disaster that had overtaken her only child.
    After he died, she added a few facts about my generation and the one after it, and my father had the genealogy typed for her, and carbon copies were sent around to everybody inthe family. My copy instantly went into a desk drawer, where it stayed for fifteen years. One day I came on it while I was looking for something else, and began to read it, beginning with my father’s generation and following the not always distinct trail back through the 19th century into the middle and early part of the 18th.
    The fact that the genealogy does not go back to the Norman Conquest and that nobody appears to have been socially distinguished makes me feel that what is there, though incomplete, is nevertheless reliable.
    Max’s daughter inherited his taste for antiquarian research. Living in a later period, with more leisure and a more professional approach, she succeeded in running down facts he had failed to come by. His notes, with her corrections and additions, were Xeroxed for me—a boxful of names, dates, and mysteries. For at certain points she too found herself blocked. As she explained, “Southern county clerks love to remind someone from Massachusetts that many records were destroyed during the Civil War—only they don’t call it that or state it so directly. They say, ‘Sorry, our records begin in 1865.’ One wrote that there was ‘a small fire’ in 1865. All this makes genealogical research in Virginia a bit tricky.”
    The first page of Max’s genealogy (which he doesn’t even call that but, instead, a “working outline”) reads:
    SOME OF THE DESCENDANTS
OF
HENRY MAXWELL
COMPILED BY
WILLIAM MAXWELL FULLER
January 22nd, 1940
    Henry Maxwell was born in Scotland about 1730. Born where? And to whom? I don’t know the answer to eitherquestion. One can speculate, but what would be the point? It is like looking out over the ocean in the dark and trying to make out something, a cliff, a stretch of coastline, when you know perfectly well that even in the daytime the other side is too far away for human eyes to see.

2
    I have always liked my name. This may be because of the people I was surrounded with as a child. When they used my name, or my brother’s, or for that matter one another’s, it was almost always with affection, which somehow rubbed off on the name itself. William Maxwell—to hold it off at arm’s length—is not a common name and neither is it exactly uncommon. It turns up in the
Waverley
novels, in Scottish and English and American history, in the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë, in all sorts of places. When Boswell has supper with his cousin, Sir William Maxwell, at Howell’s in Half Moon Street, I know that it is not me, that it has nothing to do with me, but, irrationally, I am pleased.
    Or perhaps the real reason I like my name is that it is Scottish. When I was six years old my mother took me to Bloomington, thirty miles away, to hear Harry Lauder. And when we arrived at the theater there were two bagpipers—huge men, over six