Suburban Valkyrie

The paper is brittle and yellowed, the ink fading away in spots. The man and woman stand side by side, barely touching, and with only the trace of a smile on their faces.



The wedding portrait of Anna Holden and Harry L. Wilson is one of my most treasured family heirlooms, but it didn't start out that way. The photo of my great grandparents was found tumbled amongst a heap of old photographs of nameless faces in a box passed on to me after my grandmother, Marion Wilson Larson, died in 1992. When I became interested in genealogy in 1999, I opened that box and began searching the faces of the people staring up at me. Who were they? Where had they come from? How were they related to my grandmother, to my father, to me?

Before the mid-1800s, of course, those questions never could have been asked, much less answered. The commercial introduction of photography in 1839, however, eventually made it possible for great great grandchildren to gaze upon the faces of long-dead relatives they had never met. Photography, at first reserved for the elite, eventually became accessible even to the farmers of Fulton County, Illinois, where Anna and Harry and their families had lived.

The family portraits for which they posed formed a thread that later would connect my present back to my past. Years worth of investigation eventually enabled me to match the vast majority of those once-unknown faces with their names.

But the fact that I even had to investigate to discover who these family members were should illustrate just how fragile our connection to our past is. And in some cases, that link can be broken forever.

So it was that I found myself crouched on the floor of an antique store in Bucks County, Pa., one recent afternoon, sifting through someone else's family treasures. Instead of being passed down to a family member - however unwitting that family member initially may have been - these treasures had been cast away. They were now staring up at passers by from boxes and bins and frames on shelves. Memories for sale.


For just $3, you, too, could own a little piece of someone else's family story. Such as this portrait of a couple on what is likely their wedding day.


Or this one of a happy bride and groom and their attendants.


Or these portraits of dapper young military men.


I touched each photo lightly, holding it by the edges. The oils transferred from careless hands can destroy old photographs. It was likely, however, that few other hands had been as careful over the years. Did the care I took in holding those photographs - those parts to someone else's family story - matter? Was I the last person to "care" for these strangers, for whatever wisps of their presence had been captured by silver nitrate to proclaim that they had lived?

A historian friend reminded me that it has been said that we die two deaths: our actual death, and another death when the last person who remembers us dies.

What was the name of the young man frozen forever in his military uniform? Did the young bride who smiled slightly up from her wedding portrait ever have children? Did she like iced tea? Did he know how to whistle?

I didn't know these people. I don't remember them, and the answers to the questions I would ask are almost certainly lost forever. For one brief moment, though, they lived again in my palms, staring out at me from the past, mutely asserting that they had lived and loved however long ago.

Genealogy can be a lonely, obsessive pursuit, and one that doesn't always seem to have an obvious benefit. By the time I set those photos of strangers back down in their antique shop bins, they had whispered confirmation of what I already knew in my heart: it is my job to ensure that Anna Holden and Harry L. Wilson do not end up staring into the eyes of a thrift shop customer in the 2050s.

It may be years before my children care to learn how the stories of their lives are entwined with the stories of those who had come before them, of the great great great grandparents who left behind everything they had known to set sail for America and the hope of new, prosperous lives. When they are ready, however, it is my job to ensure that our fables and our photos still survive, to be bequeathed to the care of the next generation to tell our family story.

They came by the thousands, a steady stream of men, women and children dressed in their best, tears in their eyes, mourning badges pinned to their clothes. By one count, more than 7,000 people shuffled past his casket each hour.

Hours upon hours later, as the body of murdered President Abraham Lincoln was carried away from the Cook County Court House back to the funeral train to make the final leg of its solemn journey toward Springfield, the Chicago Tribune estimated that 36,000 people had taken part in the funeral procession, and 100,000 had crowded the streets to witness the procession.

"No community has done itself such peculiar honor as Chicago did yesterday, by the vast magnitude, the perfect order and solemn beauty of the funeral procession," proclaimed the newspaper on May 2, 1865. "The most careful estimates by time and actual count show that thirty-six thousand people participated in the procession as members of organized military, civic, municipal, educational, religious or other associations, apart from the immense numbers, amounting to at least one hundred thousand citizens, who thronged the line of the procession from curb-stone to house top."

Only five years before, the city of Chicago had hosted the Republican National Convention, where the jubilant party faithful had chosen the man who now lay dead - "a man known to the public only for his inflexible honesty and sterling common sense" - to represent their party on the ballot for president and to "reverse the policy of the country in regard to" slavery.

Like generations of Illinois schoolchildren before me, I learned the details of our former president's life and even felt a sort of pride of relation. Growing up in the "Land of Lincoln" makes one acutely aware of the much-revered traits of honesty and integrity for which Lincoln was justifiably renowned.

That academic connection took on a far more personal tenor, however, one day in 1999, when I discovered a brittle, yellowed print among a collection of family photos that I had inherited.

The depiction on the front showed a train.



The handwriting on the back showed why that photo had been kept amongst our family's heirlooms for decades. "Train that carried Lincoln's body from Wash. to Ill."


Shot in the head while watching a play with his wife, Lincoln died the morning of April 15, 1865 - 150 years ago today. It had been just six days since Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse to end the Civil War. Already torn apart by war and personal loss, much of the nation was plunged into grief and shock at the loss of the president. Though a funeral was held in Washington, D.C., that was not enough. The people needed to pay their respects.

"In an age before television or radio, the only way for a person to participate was to leave her farm or close his store and physically go to a funeral procession where Lincoln lay in state," writes Ainissa Ramirez, in Time magazine. "Lincoln's funeral train allowed the nation to mourn in unison by bringing him to them in a way that neither telegraph nor newspapers could satisfy."

And so began what many historians have called the longest funeral in history.

The United States, a private train car which had been built so that Lincoln would have a means to travel the country to unite the people after the Civil War, instead was outfitted as a hearse car. It carried Lincoln's body on a 13-day, 1,600-mile route from Washington, D.C. to the murdered president's final resting place in the Illinois state capital of Springfield.

A pilot train ran ahead of the funeral train, sounding a solemn bell to give notice to the people. Then the funeral train itself - a portrait of the president mounted above the cattle catcher and black mourning cloth draping the hearse car - would arrive, passing solemnly at no more than 20 miles per hour through each and every community.

An estimated 1.5 million people turned out along the route to bear witness to the president's passing, some traveling to cities to view or participate in elaborate funeral ceremonies, others lining dusty crossroads in the countryside. They came at all hours of the day and night. The president of the New York Central Railroad, who was aboard the funeral train, said, "As we sped over the rails at night, the scene was the most pathetic ever witnessed. At every crossroads the glare of innumerable torches illuminated the whole population, kneeling on the ground."

As the train neared Lincoln's home state and approached Chicago, emotions were high. Newspapers had printed daily updates, dispatched from reporters accompanying the funeral procession, and the people had followed along.

INDIANAPOLIS, Sunday - Midnight
The remains have been placed on the train, and we resume our journey to Chicago. On the way we pass in succession Augusta and Zionsville. These are small places, but it seems the inhabitants are on the roadside. Some of them hold torches in their hands, and the surroundings are solemnly lighted up. Men stand with uncovered heads as the train hurries on its way. - The New York Times, May 1, 1865

By the time the train finally reached Chicago, the city was virtually shut down.

"There was none of the hum of business; none of the rush and whirl and hot haste that characterize Chicago, - but closed stores, silent streets and sadness resting on all faces," wrote U.S. Sanitary Commission activist Mary A. Livermore. "Flags bound with crape floated mournfully at half-mast. Black draperies shrouded the buildings. All talk was low and brief. Many wept as they walked, and on the breast or arm of all were mourning badges. All nationalities, creeds, and sects were ranged along the route to be taken by the funeral cortege, or stood amid the solemn pageantry and funeral splendor of the great procession."

At the time of Lincoln's death, my paternal ancestors - the Wilsons, Holdens, Garretts and Campbells - lived on farms in Fulton County, Illinois. The first husband of my great great great grandmother Mary (Rounds) Garrett, whose name was John W. Shores, had responded to Lincoln's call for more troops in the early years of the Civil War. Shores enlisted in Company G of the 85th Illinois Infantry in August 1862. He was killed in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, on June 27, 1864, fighting for the ideals in which Lincoln had believed so fervently.

Meanwhile, my maternal ancestors, the Blackburns, still had lived in Pennsylvania in the 1860s but shortly would move to Nebraska, where my great grandfather Ross Milward Blackburn was born. As a young man, Ross took a job with the Chicago & North Western Railway offices in Iowa. In 1905, he was transferred to the company's Chicago office. He worked for the railroad his entire life. It was among the photos from his side of the family where I found the image of Lincoln's funeral train, with the note on the back written in an (as yet) unknown hand.

Who originally had obtained the photo? Who had tucked it away amidst the baby pictures and wedding portraits of the Blackburn and Piehl families?

Moments after Lincoln died in a bedroom at the Petersen boarding house, across the street from Ford’s Theater, the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, reputedly said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

And so he does. But one of my forebears took time to preserve this photographic copy of a copy of a relic of a quintessentially American saint. Perhaps they hoped that by doing so, they too could lay claim to some infinitesimal part of him. They were confident enough in the success of their efforts to make the photo a family heirloom, preserved across the decades. And now, 150 years later, those 1,600 miles of rail have led to a shelf in a closet in my home, where a photo of Lincoln's funeral train laid where it has for decades, folded in amongst photos of somber newlyweds and round-cheeked babies.

I want to follow those rails back where they came from. I want to meet the people who kneeled with lanterns in the night as the fallen President passed by on his journey into the ages. They are my people, and they, too, belong to the ages. But if we take the time to listen to their whispering — and they never stop whispering, which is perhaps why we listen so rarely — the ages also can belong to us.