Connected to History

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When I was growing up, I visited my grandmother in southern Maryland almost every summer. She still lived in the same home where my father had been raised. This house was a veritable museum containing some remarkable items, like muskets from the Revolutionary War. At the time, though, I thought every old house had one.

During family reunions, we would explore the old house. My father and my aunts and uncles often told me stories that had been passed down in the family about how each item had come into the family’s possession and how it was connected to us. Often these stories felt remote, like fairytales. How was I related to a nineteenth-century D.C. lawyer, or German and Irish immigrants, or families that fought on both sides of the Civil War? I found the tales entertaining, but they were just stories. That was until I made my own discovery in Grandma’s house.

I was a very curious child who enjoyed wandering down old creaky hallways and looking at things on the walls.  The summer I was twelve, I noticed a portrait on the wall of an upstairs foyer. It was a large black-and-white portrait of a serious-looking man with an impressive beard. The caption read “Col. J. S. McCoy.” I was looking at the face of my father’s father’s father’s father. He had been a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War. At the age of twelve, the best response I could muster to this discovery was, “That’s pretty cool.”

I turned around and on the facing wall I saw a framed piece of paper. Reading it for the first time, I quickly realized this was the official certificate promoting my great-great-grandfather to the rank of Colonel. It was a fascinating document; the date on it indicated it was from the time of the Civil War. I was reading something that had been written more than one hundred and thirty years before. That’s a pretty big revelation for a twelve year old. The real shock came when I reached the bottom of the paper.

I read who it was signed by.

I read it again.

I read it a third time.

This document was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. I, in a small way was connected to the sixteenth president of the United States of America, and my favorite president. My family was part of this history. I was directly connected to this history.

That feeling of being connected to history has stayed with me.

After doing some research years later, I now know that the document might have been signed in Lincoln’s name but possibly not by him, though I like to think it was actually signed by the Great Emancipator himself. This does not make the promotion order any less authentic or lessen that feeling I got as a child, looking at this signature and suddenly feeling that I had a direct connection to one of the most important events in American history.

This document was cared for, protected and then proudly displayed by those who came before me. Thanks to my family believing that this document was important and deserved to be preserved, I, in the mid-1990s, had a chance to be connected to the 1860s.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King remarks that writing is a form of time travel. When you write in a journal, you are having a conversation with the person who later reads it. In this way you are talking to the future. When I read that document I felt I had, in a way, entered into a conversation with both a man who bore my last name long before I had and a man I consider one of most extraordinary people in all of history.

That is why preservation is important. Who knows, today’s preservation work might even inspire my own great-great-grandson when, at twelve years old, he walks down his own creaky old hallway. I want him to discover something amazing.

Dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Elizabeth McCoy (1918-2010). She not only loved history, but she made it a point to both live it and protect it.

This article was posted courtesy of the Association for Library Technical services & Collections (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association, during National Preservation Week. 

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