When I was born in 1960, two of my great-grandparents were still living: a great-grandmother, Anna (Pagel) Stob, on my father's side, and John Meyer, a great-grandfather on my mother's side. Anna died just before I turned three, and I have only vague memories of her, but John (for whom I was named), lived until I was nine, and I have clear memories of him. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, while he lived in what seemed the far-away place of Louisville, Kentucky. My mother had not been very close to her grandfather (whom we called "Papa"), but my grandmother, his daughter, would always pay him a yearly visit in the summer and made regular phone calls. I remember always sending him a card for his birthday, but I only got to meet him once on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. The event seemed important enough that my mother and father decided to gather my brother and me in the car and make the drive south to celebrate.
Up until that time, I had never met a centenarian. My grandparents, all four of them, were in their sixties and seventies when I was growing up, and they had always been vibrant, engaging, and indulging of a small boy. Papa, however, was of an earlier generation: old, frail, taciturn, and formal.
John Meyer's life had been recounted countless times by his daughter, my grandmother. Born in Bavaria in 1869, he was a peace-loving man who hated the Army and the German unification efforts of Otto von Bismarck. Boys were told that they had to serve in the new Prussian Army, and if they refused, they would be shot. Escape was impossible, the officials had added. John was undeterred. An older brother had deserted the Army and made it safely to America, and John, at his mother's urging, decided to join him there. He left a detailed account of how he purchased a ticket, took rivers to reach Antwerp, and there boarded the S. S. Waesland for a two-week voyage on rough April seas for Castle Garden in New York City in 1887. He still had the silk scarf that had kept him warm in steerage and remembered later having to clean up from the sea-sickness of the man in the upper bunk. Once reaching Louisville, he found work as a gardener for $5 a month before eventually finding better-paying employment in the meat-packing plants of the city's Butchertown neighborhood. Though raised a Catholic, he had married a Swiss woman and together they were converted to the Baptist Church in a 1901 revival meeting. Still scared that the authorities would track him down, he had changed his name from Johann Knoll to John Meyer, just to be safe. My grandmother was always proud of the fact that her father was very mild-tempered, never punished his daughters with spanking, would shine their shoes and tell a joke, and was most happy when either working in his garden late at night by lamp-light or attending a Louisville Symphony concert.
So, in 1969, I got to come face-to-face with the legend. Papa had been ill that year, was nearly deaf and could barely speak. He was a little frightening to a small boy more accustomed to indulgent grandparents. But he smiled, I shook his hand, and I remember him clapping when his large cake arrived. I wanted a more meaningful encounter, but at least I got to meet him. He would pass peacefully away three months later.
I suppose it was the combination of the stories, the old photographs from the 1890s, and the chance to actually meet the ancestor in the flesh that made genealogy something very tangible to me at an early age. I enjoyed hearing the stories and collecting ephemera. Just this year I have finally completed tracing all of his known ancestry in Bavaria, with most lines going back to the seventeenth century - a task, I suspect, that would have been incomprehensible to a man who spent his career in a meet packing plant. "Why do it?" he would surely have asked. Why indeed.
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