The Right Time
A forgotten box, a 150-year-old mystery, and an answer that came when I least expected it
Last Sunday, when my brother opened that forgotten box in his storage room, he would have never imagined the discovery we were about to make.
About forty years ago, as a curious teenager, he couldn’t stop pestering my grandparents with questions about their families and in particular, the lives their own parents, those brave souls that had decided to leave everything behind and emigrate to a faraway land. He talked to other family members of that generation, photocopied every official document he could get his hands on and collected old photos of people that had died decades ago. He painstakingly put as many pieces of the puzzle together as he could, carefully shaping our own family tree by sticking everything in an old photo album.
That album – amongst a few others – was in that box he had forgotten existed.
As soon as he found it, my brother called our family Whatsapp group. He shared his excitement at the prospect of us spending time in our forthcoming summer holiday going through it with his children. He wants my parents to tell them the family stories their parents told us while sitting in the shade on scorching summer afternoons. Amongst those, two questions remained unanswered and all that was handed down from generation to generation were conjectures – each one with their own story: where our paternal ancestors came from and what is the correct spelling of our family name (if not the one we’ve used for 150 years).
When I moved to Europe over twenty years ago, I set out to find those answers. I could barely contain my excitement each time I took the train to the regional archives to wade through the microfilms of parish documents I had requested. I wasn’t discouraged by the fact that there were a few villages that sounded like the name someone had phonetically handwritten in an old police certificate from 1930, the only document that had information about his geographical origin. If I didn’t find him in one village, I knew I would find him in the next one. I just had to do the work. Each time I felt closer to solving the mystery. I meticulously looked through hundreds of registrar pages looking for my great-grandfather’s birth certificate. I never found it.
The questions remained unanswered and we went on with our lives. Until last Tuesday.
The topic had been lingering in my brother’s mind, who suggested resuming our search. This time in the digital world. I took the challenge and resurfaced some old notes I had kept with a couple of potential spellings of my great-grandparents’ name and a wedding date we had no document to prove. I felt the same excitement I used to feel taking the train to the archives even though this time I was at home and didn’t have to fill any administrative forms.
Two hours later, in the depth of the night, I found myself staring at a screen with a digitalized version of the wedding certificate signed by my ancestors a century and a half ago, with the answers we had been looking for and much more.
The following day, I called my dad to tell him about my discovery. He was shocked. He kept asking me questions about the information I was sharing with him. The names, the dates, the places. He was eager to see the village on a map. He wanted to be part of this moment. The night before I had not been able to go further, so that morning I invited him to search together for more information about his grandfather, the man that had crossed the ocean and started a family – our family – on the other side of the Atlantic. The man he had met and interacted with as a kid, over eighty years ago. We not only found the coveted birth certificate but we could also see his military records. It then dawned on us that if he had stayed in Europe, he would have fought in the Great War. There was a note saying he did not do his military service due to being absent in America. A different type of courage might have saved his young life. We discovered his unknown middle name, which my father had never heard of. He kept telling me about the very vague memories he had about him, what he looked like, how he remembered him sounding. His eyes were filled with emotion. His identity was now complete.
When I started my sabbatical after 25 years working in the corporate world, I was expecting to experience some level of identity loss. That seems to be part of major life transitions. However, eight months into my break, I have not had this experience (yet?). Maybe it’s because I changed companies several times, so I had less of an attachment to specific titles? Or because most people don’t really understand what I do so I have always resorted to just saying “I work for company X”? Or because my engagement in non-work activities has made me less dependent on a professional identity? Whatever the reason, this week my identity was deeply shaken, but in an unexpected and very different way.
This definitely wasn’t what I expected, but oddly, the timing feels perfect. I spent a few months twenty years ago looking for the answer to a question I let go thinking I would never get to the bottom of it. Unexpectedly, it arrived this week.
During my sabbatical reflections, I haven’t been short of questions. Some of the answers are starting to emerge. Some still feel far away. What happened this week makes me wonder: how many of my questions are meant to be answered now? How many will remain open for me to continue exploring after my sabbatical? What is the right timing?
When our search started, my brother’s children hadn’t been born, my father was not in the winter of his life and I wasn’t in a reflective mode. But the long-sought answer finally came. Unexpectedly. At the right time.
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