My father once told me a story about how his grandfather, Charles Van Valin, moved with his wife and young son to South Dakota and bought some cheap farmland. This would have been around 1907. He built a sod house, started working the fields, but the uncommonly good weather of the previous years did not hold out—the land dried up, the crops withered. One day my grandfather Carol, who would have been two or three, excitedly reported finding a “nest of worms”. His mother investigated and found, not worms, but a nest of baby rattlesnakes near the door! That was the last straw—they moved back to Nebraska, where Charles found a job as a fireman on the railroad.

The above is an sample of what might be called personal or family history. It is often communicated orally or, if written, circulated only within a small circle of relations. Yet these small histories are as important as those we learn in the classroom—they tell us, in a direct sense, where we come from. And to the reader outside the family they add a small but colorful piece to the vast montage of the comedie humaine. Our words do sometimes outlive us, and that can be a good thing.

With that in mind, we present this issue of Whistling Shade with an ancestry theme. Follow us along as we visit Plymouth Colony, a carriage stuck in the mud in northern Minnesota, Minneapolis during World War II, and to southern Italy, where an uncle’s dark past lies hidden. On the way we’ll catch a little fly fishing in Michigan, visit a house of dreams, shag balls in Wrigley field circa 1950 and even take in a game of pool.

Near the end of her story “Old Mortality”, Katherine Anne Porter has her heroine Miranda rebel against her own family history: “Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond.” But if we discard the past entirely, throw away the compass and map, where are we then?

- Joel Van Valin