As we were clearing up the dinner plates last night and pulling out the remaining sheets of homework, I started telling Jonah about his great-great grandfather. Since my dad was always the story teller at our dinner table growing up, I know more about his side of the family. Mom was too busy and too business-like to share her stories.
Great-grandfather Norton was a peculiar guy. An alcoholic who never missed a day of work and lived until he was 90. A brilliant man who calculated the exact number of cobble stones needed to pave a road in Chicago in his head, yet never finished third grade. A bigot who taught my dad slurs for every ethic group, yet wasn't allowed entry into white bars in Chicago after he turned permanently purple after a quack doctor gave him silver nitrate for arthritis. He was shot through the arm by Indians who were angry that they were fired from a railroad job. He saw the smoke of the Chicago fire. When he was very young, he made a living as a boxer in saloons across the mid-west.
His blue eyes were so light that they don't show up in the black and white photographs of the time. His eyes are white and empty. Ian has the same eyes.
My dad wrote a lovely essay about his grandfather that was published in Atlantic Monthly several years ago. I loved what he wrote about his grandmother — I have her energy level and wiry red hair.
As I told Jonah this story, he eyes lit up. Perhaps he was just stalling, putting off homework for five more minutes, but I think he was genuinely fascinated. Just as Ian has Grandpa Norton's eyes, he knew that he has Grandpa Norton's talent for doing math problems in his head. I realized that I hadn't taken the time to tell Jonah the stories of our family. Too busy and too distracted. We have to do a little less rushing and take the time to pass on the stories. Tonight, I think I'll tell him about him about his Great Grandpa Iafolla who served Churchill his meals at the Savoy Hotel in London.
Apt. 11d 
Our kids love those stories, too. They also love stories of our lives, stories of our childhood, college, and before children. My husband tells the stories as part of the bedtime routine. It’s adorable to overhear them.
Great article in the monthly, and I love the illustration with the purple grandfather.
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Wonderful stories.
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That’s awesome.
I’ve been trying to track down my father’s grandfather’s family, which has involved a lot of looking at census records and sending away to the NYC municipal archives (pretty much everyone in my dad’s family, both sides, was from Brooklyn). I don’t have any stories, unfortunately, but I have names and addresses, and I have Google Street View, so I go look at the addresses where they lived and wonder if those houses were there in 1900. And I wonder about their lives. I wish we had more stories. š¦
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Speaking of census and family histories, one of my many genealogically-minded relatives was digging through the census for our home town in WA and discovered that back in the very early days (1870s?), one of the town fathers had a black wife and kids. The black wife and kids eventually disappear from the census records, so there’s a mystery. What happened to them? There’s also the question of where the wife came from originally, although my relatives have some ideas.
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