This is a different kind of post for me, a mostly silly collection of genealogy-related poems I've picked up here and there over time. Most of them aren't very good (and some are really bad, poetically), but I hope they provoke a smile or two.
Genealogy & Family History Community
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Leave the blood feuds at home
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I figure I'll start with the best: Walt Whitman's "Unnamed Lands," in which he poses some questions familiar to any genealogist. First, the sonorous opening:
NATIONS ten thousand years before these States, and many times
ten thousand years before these States,
Garner'd clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
travel'd their course and pass'd on,
Then another taste of this
longer poem:
O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any
more than we are for nothing,
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as
much as we now belong to it.
Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
Some with oval countenances learn'd and calm,
Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,
Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
laboring, reaping, filling barns,
Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
Are those billions of men really gone?
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
Did they achieve nothing for good, for themselves?
(And then in a litany of "I believe"'s Whitman goes on to provide his own life-affirming answers.)
Next we have Edgar Guest, a poet who can usually be counted on for a smile, here in a more pensive mood:
Just Folks
I am like him, so they say,
Who was dead before I came.
Cheeks and mouth and eyes of gray
Have been fashioned much the same.
I am like her, so they say,
Who was dead ere I was born,
And I walk the self-same way
On the paths her feet have worn.
There is that within my face
And the way I hold my head
Which seems strangely to replace
Those who long have joined the dead.
Thus across the distance far
In the body housing me
Both my great-grandparents are
Kept alive in memory.
~ Edgar A. Guest (1934)
This one echoes Mr. Guest:
The Bridge
The way I walk I see my mother walking,
The feet secure and firm upon the ground.
The way I talk I hear my daughter talking
And hear my mother's echo in the sound.
The way she thought I find myself now thinking,
The generations linking
In a firm continuum of mind.
The bridge of immortality I'm walking,
The voice before me echoing behind.
~ Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt
I think of this one every time I search Find a Grave:
Dear Ancestor
Your tombstone stands among the rest;
Neglected and alone.
The name and date are chiseled out
On polished, marbled stone.
It reaches out to all who care
It is too late to mourn.
You did not know that I exist
You died and I was born.
Yet each of us are cells of you
In flesh, in blood, in bone.
Our blood contracts and beats a pulse
Entirely not our own.
Dear Ancestor, the place you filled
One hundred years ago
Spreads out among the ones you left
Who would have loved you so.
I wonder if you lived and loved,
I wonder if you knew
That someday I would find this spot,
And come to visit you.
(author unknown)
And there's this one, pretty awful poetry with a spot-on message:
Why I Am a Genealogist
I get the worst machine and turn the crank,
And watch the names go by,
My eyes bug out and I'll be frank,
I sometimes wonder why
And does it really make a damn,
If Becky married Tom or Sam?
Or sailed upon the sea?
The dusty books, the puzzled looks,
That's genealogy.
The census scrawl, the long lost mall,
The time I once had free,
When hours were spent,
In blessed sleep,
Not genealogy!
Once it was the football teams,
Or looking at the stars,
A fish to catch down by the stream,
And playing my guitar.
Now it's names galore and tales of yore,
And thou and thy and thee
The courthouse burned!
What have I learned?
That's genealogy.
But then I look at all the names,
In ordered files, forever claimed,
From time's dark clutch,
It isn't much,
My genealogy.
I know they're out there, calling me,
The names, the dates, the stories,
The lure of genealogy,
Is long lost love and glory.
You ask me why I cruise the Net,
And write for Rooters free,
I guess it's that I love the stuff,
This genealogy!
~ Randall Black
And more humor:
The Elusive Ancestor
I went searching for an ancestor,
I cannot find him still.
He moved around from place to place
and did not leave a will.
He married where a courthouse burned,
he mended all his fences.
He avoided any man who came
to take the U.S. Census.
He always kept his luggage packed,
this man who had no fame,
And every 20 years or so,
this rascal changed his name.
His parents came from Europe.
They should be on some list
of passengers to the U.S.A.,
but somehow they got missed.
And no one else in this world
is searching for this man.
So, I play geneasolitaire
to find him if I can.
I'm told he's buried in a plot,
with tombstone he was blessed;
but the weather took engraving,
and some vandals took the rest.
He died before the county clerks
decided to keep records.
No family Bible has emerged,
in spite of all my efforts.
To top it off, this ancestor
who caused me many groans,
Just to give me one more pain,
betrothed a girl named JONES!
~ Merrell Kenworthy
Another:
Family Tree
I climbed my family tree and found it was not worth the climb;
And so, I scampered down, convinced it was a waste of time.
Some branches of my tree, I found, were rotten to the core.
And, all the tree was full of sap and hung with nuts galore!
I used to brag of my kinfolk, before I made the climb,
but truth compels me not to tell of those not worth a dime.
And I beg friends who boast aloud of their ancestors great,
To climb their family tree and learn of those who weren't so straight.
I've learned what family trees are like, I've seen them growing 'round.
They're like a 'tater' vine because, the best are underground!
(author unknown)
And then there's this one, an oddity indeed:
The limbs that move, the eyes that see,
These are not entirely me;
Dead men and women helped to shape
The mold which I do not escape;
The words I speak, my written line,
These are not uniquely mine.
For in my heart and in my will
Old ancestors are warring still,
Celt,Roman, Saxon, and all the dead
From whose rich blood my veins are fed,
In aspect, gesture, voices, tone,
Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone;
In fields they tilled I plow the sod,
I walk the mountain paths they trod;
And round my daily steps arise
The good and bad of those I comprise.
~ Richard Rolle (1290-1349)
(Rolle died in 1349, the first year that the Black Death came to England, and it may have been the cause of his death.)
Finally, a quote from George Bernard Shaw:
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
Special (non-poetry) bonus section: One of my favorite bloggers has posted "The Top 5 Ways to Score Points with Your Descendants," an amusing list. Fair use prevents me from copying the entire thing, but here's Number One:
1. Please don’t recycle the same stock names in every generation. We know you’re in love with tradition, and tradition is a good thing, but you don’t actually need four John Smiths who are first cousins. Mix it up a little. Get some new names into the gene pool, people. Give your kids weird names that will get them pummeled on the playground but will serve the family’s greater interest in the centuries to come. Gwyneth Paltrow’s really on to something here.
Oh, and keep in mind that...
Genealogists never die, they just lose their census!