my next book, prairie leveretts, i think i will dedicate to uncle will and the folks who didn't make it. he's actually my great-grandfather will's uncle will, or my great-great grandfather's brother.

my great-great grandfather grew up with will, they were a year apart. they had come across from maine in a wagon loaded down with all their worldly possessions, 1600 miles, at the ages of four and five, to start a new life on a farm outside of quincy. while they were there that whole mormon thing happened, but they weren't involved; they were farmers. they were actually tolerant of the mormons, i felt, since the mormons didn't cause them any trouble.

but the year they got there cholera took 6% of quincy, and it was a busy, bustling town and not everyone was making it. moving way out to the country, they avoided it the best they could. they lived through a depression and grew stuff in the rich southwest illinois soil.

my great-great grandfather and his brother went off to shurtleff college in alton where they had relatives who had helped run the place. one summer will went up to saint paul, and he came back with cholera and died. that was 1854, 100 years before i was born.

there are others who didn't make it. their genealogy disappears; you get the sense that these crinkly papers in my files are begging me to notice them. it's easy to notice my great-great grandfather; he's on the line that goes straight back to the puritans and old bostonians that i am descended from. it's a little different with these people on the side.

one of them is my cousin frank. he's actually great grandpa will's cousin frank; there was a two-year-old in that wagon, and the two-year old became a farmer and father of cousin frank. so frank was great-grandpa will's cousin, and he grew up on a farm in denmark, iowa and became a famous geologist. he walked across iowa observing the rocks, and he became a professor at the university of michigan. while he was there, he became interested in the family dilemma - how to connect us with those original puritans. he did research on hudson and the williams.

as a famous geologist, he got two glaciers named for him. one is quite obscure and back in the part of greenland that nobody ever goes to. it's endangered by global warming, but nobody even knows about it except specialists in glaciology. but the other one is in antarctica, and it's quite famous. that's because, if you want to take the short cut to the south pole, say because you are delivering supplies to the south pole station, you want to know where that glacier feeds out to the sea because that's your short cut. you start at that glacier, and follow the little markers until you get to that south pole station.

but i digress. this frank is a really interesting character, and he has beautiful handwriting. he writes letters to his cousin will, my great grandfather, who is a historian and who cares about such things as who is related to whom. his letters are folded carefully and put into pretty little envelopes and he talks about the stuff he's found. the problem is, it's gotten hard for me to read that kind of cursive. i have a hard enough time with type-written ink that is bled into crinkly old paper. i have an even tougher time with the cursive, beautiful as it is.

but i'm going to continue to try. there is no one to call frank a direct relative in the same way my great-great grandfather is to me, my father's father's father's father. frank didn't have any kids, for whatever reason. like will, they're just out there. but people write back and forth asking for will's picture. that's because apparently he looks like the ancestors, and they know it. he's the one who really carries that look.

and so it goes, among the crinkly papers, that fall apart sometimes when i touch them, i encounter these folks, and it seems like i'm here to put this kind of stuff in writing. quick, because the next generation can't read cursive at all, and will have no other option but to just throw it out.