I have in mind a picture never taken: a gaunt young man, black haired, pale-skinned. He is standing along the edge of a dirt road somewhere in DeKalb County, Alabama. He has a hat in one hand; with the other hand, he shields his eyes from the sun.
This past weekend, Mom gifted me with with two notebooks stuffed with genealogical information on her and my father’s families. On my father’s side, the record goes back just three generations, to Andrew Jackson McElroy.
Everything I know about this man — my grandfather’s father — boils down to this: born in 1860, married in 1882, died in 1935.
He was born the same year Lincoln was elected President. As were many children at the time, he was probably named for President Andrew Jackson, whose Southern heritage was a point of pride. He was a year old when the Confederacy was established, and just five years old when the war came to an end.
As a young man in Alabama, he would have seen the mining industry trigger insane growth, transforming Birmingham (the “Magic City”) from an isolated farming community to an industrial powerhouse in nine short years. That wealth probably didn’t reach him in DeKalb County, though, where sharecroppers — blacks and whites who rented their land by working it for the owners — were on the rise.
He would have been 73 when Prohibition was abolished, and just 75 when he died — the same year the government gave us both the FBI and Social Security.
I haven’t yet found his father or mother. I can’t yet move back in time beyond him. For now, Andrew Jackson McElroy is the end of the line.
And so I find myself wondering about the life of this man I’ve never met. What brought his family to Alabama? Where did they come from? How did they survive the Civil War? When did they arrive in the United States — and where did they come from, and why?
What did he care about? What did he dream about? Did he tell stories? Was he a good father to his twelve (!) children? Was he happy? Did he look like me?
I’m a creature of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, accustomed to every detail of someone’s life being published, preserved, and searchable. It’s frustrating to have nothing more of Andrew Jackson McElroy than a name, a handful of dates, and a trail that peters out, fading away into foggy peaks of the Appalachians.
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