Five More Minutes

Have you ever looked at an old family photograph and wished someone were still here to tell you who the people were and the stories behind them? I have. More times than I can count.

I can tell you where my great-great-grandfather lived in 1880. I know his occupation, his wife's first and maiden names, and the names of their children. I know which church some of them attended and where several are buried. I have found marriage announcements, obituaries, city directories, census records, and newspaper clippings so small I had to enlarge them until the letters blurred.

I have learned to recognize the language of old records: boarder, widow, laborer, naturalized, removed to. I have spent hours trying to prove that one person was the same person who appeared twenty years later with a slightly different spelling of his name.

But there are things no record can tell me.

That is what I think about whenever I look at the photograph of the woman in the white dress.

She is standing beside my grandmother on the front steps of a house I don't recognize. My grandmother is young, probably in her twenties, and smiling in a way I rarely saw when I knew her. Not because she was unhappy. She just wasn't someone who smiled automatically for a camera.

The woman beside her is laughing. Not smiling. Laughing.

Her head is tilted back slightly, and one hand is touching my grandmother's arm as if something happened just before the picture was taken.

I don't know her name.

I have looked. Of course I have looked.

The photo came from a box that found its way to me years after my grandmother died. There are no names on the back, only a faint blue stamp from the company that developed the film.

I've compared the woman's face with family pictures. I've searched through marriage records and yearbooks. I've studied the shape of her nose as though bone structure might somehow introduce us.

Nothing.

Sometimes I catch myself staring at the picture and thinking, Grandma would know.

That thought always brings me back to the afternoon when I was ten.

I don't remember why we were at Grandma's house that day. We visited often enough that there probably wasn't a reason. Her house was simply one of those places that existed as a permanent part of childhood, the way school and Christmas and the grocery store existed.

I remember the living room better than I remember what season it was. The couch had cushions that seemed enormous when I was small. Framed photographs sat on the tables, and Grandma kept things that adults considered decorations and children considered things they weren't supposed to touch.

That afternoon, she took out a photo album.

It wasn't beautiful. There were no decorative pages or carefully arranged captions. It was one of those thick albums with pictures tucked beneath clear plastic.

I sat beside her.

She turned the first page.

"That's me," she said.

I leaned closer.

The girl in the photograph had long dark hair and skinny legs. She was standing with several other girls whose dresses looked strange to me.

"That's you?"

Grandma laughed.

"Yes, that's me."

"You had long hair?"

"I wasn't always old."

I laughed because that seemed ridiculous.

Grandmothers, as far as I was concerned, had always been grandmothers.

She pointed to another one.

"That's my sister."

I don't remember which sister.

That bothers me now.

At ten, the names went past me too quickly. Aunts and cousins and neighbors blended together into a group of people who belonged to Grandma's past, which seemed impossibly far away.

She showed me another picture. A house stood behind a group of people.

"Whose house was that?" I asked.

"Our house."

"You lived there?"

"For a while."

I looked more closely. It was difficult to imagine Grandma living anywhere except the house where we were sitting.

She told me something about the people in it. I wish I could remember what.

Maybe they were celebrating something.

Maybe someone had gotten married.

Maybe it was simply a Sunday afternoon.

I don't know.

For years, I have tried to retrieve that conversation from wherever forgotten childhood moments go. I can still see her finger pointing at the pictures. I cannot hear the words.

She kept turning pages.

I asked questions here and there, probably the kinds of questions children ask.

"Who's that?"

"Why is everybody dressed like that?"

"Was that your dog?"

"How old were you?"

There may have been a photograph of her parents.

There may have been ones of people whose names I now search for online.

I don't know.

Then my father appeared.

"Come on," he said. "We have to go."

I looked at him, then back at the album.

Grandma had one hand beneath the next page.

"It’s okay. It’s time to go," she said.

Or maybe I only remember her saying that because I need her to have said it.

Memory is unreliable that way.

I got up.

I didn't say, "Can we have five more minutes?"

I didn't say, "Grandma, can we finish this next time?"

I didn't even think about the album again on the ride home.

I was ten.

There would always be another visit.

There would always be another afternoon.

There would always be Grandma.

Years passed, and I grew up.

At some point, family history became interesting.

Then interesting became fascinating.

Then fascinating became the sort of thing that kept me awake much later than I intended, because I found a newspaper article from 1912, and one sentence in it answered a question I'd had for six months.

Genealogy taught me patience.

It taught me how much can survive.

A name written in a church register can last centuries. A census taker's handwriting can preserve the members of a household. A city directory can tell you that someone moved from one side of town to another between 1894 and 1895.

Sometimes you get lucky.

An obituary says someone loved music.

A newspaper article mentions a school prize.

A wedding announcement describes a dress.

A yearbook gives you a face.

Those discoveries feel like victories.

But genealogy also teaches you how much disappears.

No census record tells you who told the funniest stories at dinner.

An obituary probably won't mention that someone hated peas.

A marriage certificate can't tell you whether the bride was nervous that morning.

A photograph preserves a second.

It does not preserve the explanation.

I began asking questions.

Unfortunately, by then some of the people who could have answered them were gone.

Including Grandma.

That realization did not come all at once.

It happened in small moments.

I would find a name and think, I should ask Grandma about—

Then remember.

I would discover an address and wonder whether she had ever been there.

Then remember.

Once, I found an old newspaper image of someone from the family. It felt miraculous. I stared at the face for a long time and wanted to know whether I had the right person.

Grandma would have known.

Then came the box of photos.

Some had names written on the back.

Bless every ancestor who ever thought to pick up a pencil and identify someone.

Others said things like Summer 1954 or At Mary's house.

Mary who?

Which house?

Then there were the completely blank ones.

That was where I found the woman in the white dress.

Grandma stood beside her.

They looked happy.

I studied the picture with the confidence of someone who had solved harder genealogical puzzles.

There had to be a way.

I made a list of possibilities.

Sister.

Cousin.

Friend.

Coworker.

Neighbor.

I compared pictures.

I searched newspapers.

I looked at family trees.

Nothing fit.

One evening, long after midnight, I had the photograph open beside a census record on my computer screen.

I suddenly remembered the album.

Not the whole afternoon.

Just Grandma's hand.

Her finger touching the worn corner of a photograph.

The plastic page lifting.

My father's voice from across the room.

Come on. We have to go.

I sat there staring at a woman who had been dead for years and finally said aloud what I had never said when it mattered.

"I regret not asking for five more minutes."

The room was quiet.

I laughed a little because five minutes sounded absurd.

Five minutes.

As though five minutes would have been enough to preserve an entire family.

Then I understood what I really regretted.

I regretted thinking there would always be another time.

At ten, I could not have known.

That doesn't erase the regret.

It only makes it gentler.

I stopped trying to identify the woman that night.

Not forever. Genealogists don't give up that easily.

But I closed the computer.

The next day, I began doing something different.

I called a relative.

"What do you remember about Grandma when she was young?"

There was a pause.

Then a laugh.

"Oh, I've got stories."

I wrote them down.

After that, I started asking more.

Who lived in that house?

Where did everyone go for holidays?

Who was strict?

Who was funny?

Who played music?

Who couldn't cook?

Which stories had been told so often everyone assumed nobody could possibly forget them?

I wrote names on photographs.

Full names when I knew them.

Dates when I could find them.

Places.

Relationships.

Sometimes I added a sentence.

She made the best apple pie.

He always sang in the car.

They met at a dance.

Things no census record would ever know.

The woman in the white dress is still unidentified.

Maybe someday I will find her.

There is always another archive, another newspaper, another box in someone's attic.

But I no longer believe finding her name will answer the most important question.

I want to know why she was laughing.

I want to know what she had just said to Grandma.

I want to know whether Grandma laughed too after the camera clicked.

Those answers are gone.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting with a younger member of the family, sorting pictures into piles across the kitchen table.

She picked one up.

"Who's this?"

I looked.

For once, I knew.

"That's your great-great-grandmother."

She stared at the picture.

"She looks serious."

"She usually did in pictures."

"Was she serious?"

I almost answered yes or no.

Instead, I told her a story.

Then another.

She picked up the next photo.

"Who's that?"

I told her.

Eventually it was time for her to go.

The girl started to put it down.

For a moment, I was ten years old again.

Grandma was beside me.

The album was open.

A page was waiting to be turned.

"Hold on," I said.

The girl looked at me.

I picked up another photograph and slid it toward her.

"Let me show you one more."