The Lost Family Register

On the seventh of August, 1832, an old soldier stood in open court in Bedford County, Tennessee, and tried to prove the day he was born. What the clerk wrote down is one of the saddest sentences in this family's whole paper trail: "he has seen it on the family Register of his father's family — but has no recollection of what has become of it at this time."

This episode is about that page and the others like it: the register John Culver saw and lost; the discharge he "took very little care of," not believing it would ever matter; the Guilford County marriage bond nobody could find, which cost his widow's estate a pension and left the file stamped REJECTED. The government of 1833 accepted a preacher's word and a letter from James K. Polk in place of one lost page. It would not do it twice.

Then the little museum of absence: the Harmondsworth parish registers lost before 1670, which left the family's oldest English claim forever without a verdict; the Rogerene generations whose refusal to register was the confession of their faith; and the register that survived and cannot be trusted — the Groton Culver Bible behind a formally registered 1920 pedigree, a family Bible that may have been reading the printed genealogies over its owner's shoulder.

The episode closes where the method register always closes, in the present tense: communities lodge, families carry — and whatever your family's version of the flyleaf is, it is currently being carried, not lodged.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.