52 Ancestors Week 1: I’d like to meet…

My paternal grandfather, Arthur Jowett, is the unmet ancestor I've known about for all of my life. He was the first of his family to be born in the US. His older brother and sister were 7 years old and 15 months old when their parents brought them to Massachusetts from Queensbury, England, their ancestral home for more generations than I’ve been able to trace. Arthur came along in 1908, 4 years after their immigration. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1965, when my dad was only 22.

1908-1965. So much that I do know that made up the dash and filled those 56 years.

He lost his mom when he was 12. He was baptized just before he was 17. He lost his dad when he was 48. He was married to my grandmother for 27 years. He became a dad when he was 34.

He was a painter in a ladder factory, a weaver in a plush mill, a house painter, a violinist with the symphony orchestra, a liquor store clerk. He was an artist who splattered magic from oils and watercolors with equal skill, a scoutmaster who sought and lead adventure and modeled service to others, a coin collector and a shorthand reader. He had enthusiastically fuzzy hair, friendly eyes with crinkles at the corners, and an imperfectly-toothed perfect smile that looks like the prelude to a hearty laugh and makes you want in on the joke.

I’d ask him all kinds of questions. Did he have a grandpa name already picked out before he died?  What was his most treasured childhood memory, tradition, toy, book? Who did his mom tell him he looked like in their family? As a boy, what did he think he would be when he grew up? What were his hardest lessons to learn? His best advice? Which one was his favorite Bible verse? His favorite dessert my grandmother made? His favorite palette knife to paint with? His favorite pocketknife to carry? Does he see anything like himself in me? Doesn’t he think my son looks like his son? 

And so I cobble together answers where I can from old records when I can scrounge them up, old pictures that surface from boxes and albums, an occasional handwritten note, and the strokes of the brush in the paintings handed down. I'm always looking for details to make the unknown more familiar, the tiny pieces of kindling that feed the fire for digging into family history and sifting through the dates to find the details that make up the dashes.