My Mother's Family Tree

My Mother's Family Tree

I would know my mother's
handwriting anywhere,
even though she created
this photo album
and family tree in 1959,
nine years before I was born.
This was a project
from her senior year,
a look backward
at grandparents and great-
grandparents before
time's blanket
had quite hidden
them from view.
The photos
are less distant,
my mother and
her twin refracted
by the brittle paper's lens:
as teenagers and children,
infants alike as acorns.
On the title page,
I can still make out
an "A" from Miss Hawes
in faded red pen.
There is a table
of contents and then
the fold out family tree.
What I notice
on the third line
of names and dates
is that my mother
has written in the years
in a different colored pen,
and I imagine her learning
from her own mother
that Elizabeth Jane
Johnson, her maternal
grandmother, was born
in 1895. And that
her grandfather,
Howard C. Schrandt
from Duluth, Minnesota,
was born on the fourteenth
of November in 1892.
And I notice as well
that no one has been
given a date of death
in this family tree,
as if, to my eighteen-
year-old mother,
Nellie Shea
from Ishpeming and
Lena Priemz
from Germany
(no town specified),
both born shortly after
the Civil War, were still
somewhere that she might
reach them, to fill
in the dates
and information
that she did not yet know.