Henry Clay Bottum was born in January 1826, in the town of Orwell, Vermont. As a young man, he moved west, first to upstate New York and then to Wisconsin, farming in Fond du Lac County. An abolitionist, he abandoned the Whig party of his namesake and became a Radical Republican, serving in the state legislature after the Civil War. He died in 1913, his remains buried in Rosendale Cemetery, 10 miles outside the small Wisconsin city of Ripon. And since February 2016, he has had a Wikipedia page.
There’s something both very charming and very odd in the fact that Wikipedia has now reached down to people whose fame rests on nothing more than a few terms as state legislators in the 19th century. But there he is, my great-great-grandfather, along with many other politicians from the long years of Wisconsin state elections. They’ve apparently all been added by a prolific Wikipedia editor who posts under the online name “Packerfansam” (a Wisconsinite, one presumes Sam is, given that he’s a fan of the Green Bay Packers and writes up items from Wisconsin history).
I might have beaten Packerfansam to the punch, posting the entry on Great-great-grandfather Henry myself. But Wikipedia says it frowns on contributions from family members, and, the truth is, I don’t actually know much about my great-great-grandfather.
His son, now—Joseph Bottum, my great-grandfather—I do have a sense of. Joe attended Ripon College before moving to the Dakota Territory in 1880 to homestead and practice law. He would end up serving as circuit judge in the town of Faulkton from 1911 to 1942—but, more to Wikipedia’s interest, he also served two terms in the South Dakota state senate. And so, thanks to the indefatigable compilers of small Wikipedia entries about forgotten state legislators, Great-grand-father Joe now rates a brief page in the online encyclopedia, as well. “He was a Republican,” the entry laconically ends.
For Joe, I have photographs of family gatherings at the old house in Faulkton, a portrait of him in his judge’s robes, and a business card from his law practice (“Wills a specialty,” it notes in a copperplate script). Stories handed down to my generation include tales of his fierce determination in court, his sentimentality about his grandchildren, and his love for the new state of South Dakota.
But I have no pictures of Henry and his wife Helen. No keepsakes, old letters, or even family lore. Perhaps that’s because the family’s migration westward after the Revolutionary War more or less ended in South Dakota, at which point mementos could be handed on. But, in fact, this sort of knowledge gap may be fairly common: We tend to know at least something about our great-grandparents. And often nothing about our great-great-grandparents.
It makes sense, I suppose, simply as a matter of generations. Our parents would be likely to have living knowledge, childhood memories, of their grandparents but not of the generation before that. And while I remember my grandfather telling stories of his father—because his son, my father, had known the man—I can’t recall his having any stories about his own grandfather.
How long do the dead remain with us? How long do the ghosts of memory last before they fade entirely away? I know innumerable stories about my own generation. As far as that goes, I know a lot about my parents’ generation and plenty about their parents’ generation. But the memory chain clearly starts to rust after 80 or 90 years. And the attempt to reach back as far as my great-great-grandfather Henry—born 190 years ago—falters and dwindles to nothing.
Some of my genealogically inclined cousins have explored the available records: old birth and death certificates in the county seats, old church registries, the markings on crumbling gravestones. And they surely know more about Henry than I do. They surely know more about his parents and grandparents, for that matter. But I’ve never been bitten by the family-tree bug (at least, not till prompted recently by Wikipedia). Besides, however detailed it becomes, the hobby of genealogy can never quite make a living connection.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s great satisfaction in the careful compilation of family trees. So many Americans pursue the hobby that there must surely be a joy in it that I don’t grasp. Still, genealogical research has always seemed to me the opposite of family: It’s what we need to do when we lack actual memories. Actual stories.
Those are the memories and stories I have for Joe and don’t have for Henry. My connection to my South Dakota great-grandfather is familial, in other words, even though he died before I was born. My connection to his Wisconsin father is only genealogical. Only Wikipedian.
