The Timely and the Timeless

Yes, it has been a while since my last post. My apologies to any of you who missed me. However, I may be back more often now.

As I write this morning, we are in the middle of a pandemic. The COVID-19 virus is wreaking havoc in the world. Just last weekend, all church meetings were cancelled for the first time in perhaps a century (echoes of the Spanish Flu in 1918/19). Who knows how the economy is going to be affected. Who knows what life will look like in six months, a year.

Nevertheless, this morning I had an experience that touched my heart. I had made notes on some of my unwise scratch paper of death notices in Belmont County, Ohio, from the mid-1850s. I have been trying to go through these and verify that they were entered in FamilySearch as much as possible. The result has been several excursions down labyrinthian rabbit holes.

This morning's entry was rather simple and straightforward:

Belmont Chronicle, January 17, 1856, page 3. Died. On the 14th ins., George Francis Hutchison, son of Jane [sic, actually James] and Bethshaba Hutchison, aged seven months, two weeks, and 4 days.

It appears that he may have been a twin, since there was an Anna also born in 1855 already listed for his family. Whatever the cause of his death, he (like how many millions of other children) had the misfortune of being born in the interim years between the censuses. Such a tiny baby and death so terribly common. Did they bury him? Did they even hold a funeral? Would he have had a headstone? Or, if not for this newspaper item, would he have been forgotten by all but his parents on the other side of the veil?

How grateful I am for the privilege of having the time (with the recommended quarantines going on at the moment, we have plenty of that---if not a plentitude of toilet tissue) to work with these sketchy notes and to try to flesh out the missing members of families. Given the number of times the contributions of random information about my family by totally unrelated persons have made a critical difference in my research, it seems like the least I can do.

So in the middle of uncertainty, may we remember the multitude of ways we can serve---both the living and the departed. And may we remember that the contributions to both may matter for all eternity.