The Storyteller's Dilemna

With dazzling simplicity, Genesis gets right to the starting point: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Somewhat less ambitious, from the Brothers Grimm among others, comes the equally trouble-free starter: "Once upon a time ...." And then we have the model for all genealogists in the Gospel of Matthew: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." In like manner, this goes on for 48 generations, from Abraham to David (14), from David to the deportation to Babylon (14) and from the deportation from Babylon to Christ (14), nicely symmetrical and more soporific than counting sheep. If, for some reason, that does not cure your insomnia, go back to Genesis 5:1-32 and work on the lineage from Adam to Noah.

It seems to me that you can tell a story this way if and only if one or more of the following conditions are met: (1) you have all the relevant facts before you start writing; (2) you are making it up as you go along; (3) you do not care if anyone reads it. Genealogy, like a crime scene investigation, works backwards in time. It starts with clues from the present and then uses those clues to reconstruct the past. So, like any good detective novel, there are really two stories -- one a whodunit and the other a howdunit.

So I plan to tell this story by ratcheting back from the present one generation at a time, sort of like winding up a music box and letting it play part of the tune, then stopping it and resetting to play the next preceeding part. But this strategy doesn't solve all problems. The biblical genealogies are, for the most part, lineal descents through the father's line. The approach here goes back through ancestors on both the maternal and paternal lines, like a fan. That means the number of direct ancestors doubles with each generation -- 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2028. Of course, this is less of a problem than trying to account for all descendants if I were to start with the earliest documented ancestor from 10 generations ago when the average number of surviving children who also had children was about five per generation -- 5, 25, 125, 575, 2875, 14375, 71875, 359375, 1796875, 8984375.

Fortunately, in more recent generations, later marriages and birth control may have saved future geneaologists the fate of Tristram Shandy, the fictional character who attempted to write his autobiography in real time and fell hopelessly behind because he could not write as fast as he lived.

Tales and Trails of Montana

Montana has many visitors. Few people live there. No one really owns it. Not the descendents of the mostly Northern European homesteaders; not the cattle ranchers; not the sheepherders; not the robber barons; not the gold miners; not the fur trappers; not even the Nez Pierce, the Sioux, the Crow or the Cheyenne. God alone can call it home. All others, like Lewis and Clark, were just passing through.

Who is it then that has the right to post those signs, "Welcome to Big Sky Country" where the blue highways, three railroads and two standardized interstates cross those imaginary lines into God's country?

More than one visitor, and more than one returning temporary resident, has laid claim to a heightened experience crossing those thresholds. And these claims have been made whether the crossing be in the southwest by way of the high dry plateau marked by Devil’s Tower; the endless horizons along the old highline route of the Great Northern Railroad; the lazy carving curves of the Yellowstone and Missouri through their strip of green hugging bottomlands; or the steep switchbacks climbing to the Mullin, Lookout, Lolo, Monida and Cooke City passes of the Bitterroot Range guarding the Western border.

The uninitiated and the skeptic might very well observe that, absent the welcome signs, the landscape looks pretty much the same in all directions at each portal. What could be more arbitrary than three borders rectified by latitude and longitude heedless of such markers left by the snowmelt of receding glaciers dripping tears that turn to salt a thousand or more miles down stream? And even ignoring the divide that separates naturally along the ridge line, from peak to peak, the great watersheds of this region and the continent?

Nevertheless, that is Montana -- geographically and a state of mind. This is the story of Dick and Doris Bell Holzworth, how they came to be there, married there, raised their five children there, then willed their final resting spot near heaven itself to watch, I think, the scattered seeds of their lineage taking root across the far reaches of the continent.