Dusk

What’s bothering me today, and has been for many days previous, is the knowledge that in time I will be forgotten.  I don’t quite understand it, really.  Shouldn’t I be afraid of the inevitable moment when I pass from life to death?  I don’t mind the setting of the sun, it’s the afterglow that frightens me – those inevitably passing minutes in which the sun’s light increasingly fades and shadows feed and grow fat.  My very last breath won’t just be the end of my life; it will be the gloaming of my life’s imprint.

Yeah.  I know.  I have friends that will immediately say they’ll never forget the impact I’ve had on their lives.  I also have those that will say I’ve been such an ass they’ll never forget me too (I heard those cheers!).  The truth is friends, and not so much friends, you won’t.  Time steals all memories away while you are living, while you are dying, and thereafter while you are lying still.  At best, all my years will become the most succinct summary; a name on a page, text on a piece of paper, or perhaps even just a number on a census.  Unless some nerdy genealogist intervenes, eventually I’ll be completely covered in both dirt and dark.

I will become a Mabel Thornton, who in a mere eighty years after her death – the equivalent of one good lifetime – passed completely from the memories of my family.  Earth and shadow had completely obscured her.  This nerdy genealogist rediscovered her as text on a page, a mere number “1” on the 1911 England census.  For the first time in English history, that particular census recorded how many children were born alive to the present marriage of each family, how many children were still living, and how many had died.  For the Thornton family, they had 6 children born alive, 5 still living, and “1” – little Mabel – who had died previous to the census.  Between the 12^th of March 1906 and the 5^th of December 1907, poor little Mabel had twenty months to take her first steps, say her first words, and suffer her first illness.  Twenty months and Bronchitis began her gloaming.

 

My Princess at 20 months

I found you, lost Mabel.  I know you lived.  I remember you, even if that memory is now only text on a page. A hundred and five years later, someone remembers you.  Who will be my nerdy genealogist?  Who will plunge their hand into the darkness, long after the afterglow, and pull me out of forgotten archives?

If you would like to know the techniques I used to find Mabel Thornton, contact me and I’ll lead you through it if you like.