Ali, I too have searched for the dead in Glasgow. A different narrative but the same in the end. James ended up poor and old and sick in the Springburn sanitarium there. Whether from stroke or dementia or something equally torturous, it's all the same yet I still wish I knew the details. It was said that his brother Thomas came from America to visit him one last time about 1900. The family lore left no cover story for him. Only the one word on a document, Springburn.
Love this so much, Ali. Maybe it's in part because my own relatives, long-deceased, haunt these same places? Or maybe because a younger version of me, walking to and from Glasgow Uni and my final student flat on Hyndland Road, haunts this 40-year-old version when she returns to the west end all too infrequently these days.
I was similarly consumed by electoral and valuation rolls, birth, death and marriage certificates, Glasgow Herald newspaper articles in an attempt to get as close to the truth of what happened to various family members, and past inhabitants of this house of ours, too. The grey areas feel fertile to me when the black and white truths are scant. I find myself filling in the gaps as you say, never sure if that's really what happened or just my fancy at it.
Ali, I too have searched for the dead in Glasgow. A different narrative but the same in the end. James ended up poor and old and sick in the Springburn sanitarium there. Whether from stroke or dementia or something equally torturous, it's all the same yet I still wish I knew the details. It was said that his brother Thomas came from America to visit him one last time about 1900. The family lore left no cover story for him. Only the one word on a document, Springburn.
Love this so much, Ali. Maybe it's in part because my own relatives, long-deceased, haunt these same places? Or maybe because a younger version of me, walking to and from Glasgow Uni and my final student flat on Hyndland Road, haunts this 40-year-old version when she returns to the west end all too infrequently these days.
I was similarly consumed by electoral and valuation rolls, birth, death and marriage certificates, Glasgow Herald newspaper articles in an attempt to get as close to the truth of what happened to various family members, and past inhabitants of this house of ours, too. The grey areas feel fertile to me when the black and white truths are scant. I find myself filling in the gaps as you say, never sure if that's really what happened or just my fancy at it.
Beautiful.
It's mostly grey, right? I think I always knew that deep down because I couldn't be unique in my ambiguity.