in illinois i had the occasion to go to the nearby town, twenty miles away from where i lived, because it was the home of a youth mental care facility. i decided to stop in on a local policeman there, because he had the exact same name i do, which you can glean off this blog if you really care. by exact i mean first, middle and last, and i'd found this out on the web a few years prior, and actually delivered a genealogy calendar to his father who also shared the same name. there are only about four or five of us in the nation, and i figured it was a huge coincidence to have two of them only twenty miles away. the genealogy on the calendar, however, was ours, not his, so might have been of limited value to them. it seemed at the time to be a gesture of friendship, and i'd met his father, but not him.

this small town was most known for its proximity to the shawnee national forest, but it was the kind of town where everyone knew each other too well, and it was hard to get away from people if you were uncomfortable with them or with the common reality everyone shares. this poor policeman had a son who had killed somebody in an accident, and drugs were involved, and some people were afraid that the son would get preferential treatment due to being the son of a policeman. i have no idea if this son got preferential treatment or not; it was an enormous tragedy, and i remember somebody at the regional dump giving me a strange look when i took a truck load of junk out there and showed him my i d, as if there could only possibly be one of us in the whole region. in other words, i knew about this tragedy when i visited. and i was also aware that our credit records got mixed up occasionally, having the same name and all, so we were already kind of permanently bound together just by the symbolic name that goes to represent us in this world. before the web, i never would have known this. now, i was exploring the consequences of such a discovery.

the small town was also known for the fact that it had been the site of a devastating tornado a few years earlier, which had flattened a neighborhood and killed a few people. it had made the news just because of the pictures of mangled neighborhood and destroyed houses. it was the kind of thing that happens every once in a while in illinois; this just happened to be their unlucky turn. it also was a huge tragedy, and in fact, even the reason i was in town was a huge tragedy. what we had in common, really, was that our lives had been marked heavily by tragedies that we had very little control over.

but he was in the building when i stopped there, and agreed to meet for a few minutes in the lobby. we talked about how we shared the name, and told family stories of where it came from. in fact he knew much less about his own heritage than i knew about mine, but, he didn't mind sharing what he knew. he said he always worked nights now; he was more comfortable that way, and dealt with fewer people, at least the kind he'd come to dislike. but working nights, that meant he was the first on the scene, the night of the tornado.

that was his claim to fame. he was a first responder, and in fact, had responded first. i had more questions to ask, but he really didn't have the time. he was working, on shift, and i had a long drive back home; i think, it was summer at the time, and the crickets were making a big racket.

i don't write about this stuff much, either my personal tragedies, or other people's, but i read an article tonight by a woman who had basically googled the ten other women who shared her name, nationwide, and actually friended them on social media and visited them if possible. she was trying to find out what commonalities names bestowed on people, at least her name, or starting with her name. it was kind of a look at what happens when you get carried away with googling your own name, a lot, or obsessively, or in variations. and it reminded me: i just finished a project where i did just that. what i have now is a book about these people who carried my name right through colonial boston and into the revolution. i looked into them in an attempt to get to the bottom of who i'm descended from, and ended up still not knowing, but knowing a whole lot more about pre-revolution boston than i do now.

it turned out that the path made its way out to illinois, from there, so that's where i'm going now, at least in my research. this guy rides a horse and wagon 1600 miles from maine to illinois, and, when he gets there, they become farmers. yes, there are tornadoes, but the ground is more fertile, and you can grow stuff. little did they know, i'd be retracing their steps, so many years later.