Thelma Lee Monroe, Verdun Monroe (my grandfather), and unknown woman, 1960
It may be that one of the most frustrating aspects of investigating your heritage is this: people in the past didn’t talk. They didn’t tell stories. They didn’t even give names.
Last week, I was in Asheville, North Carolina, to interview my uncle, Bruce Monroe, my mother’s brother. He could tell me about his parents, of course, and to some extent his grandparents. But beyond that, he didn’t know anything. It was my research that told him about the fact the Monroe’s originated in Virginia and, further back, in Scotland, and that his mother’s ancestors were mostly German immigrants, save for one Englishman.
But why didn’t people in the past talk about their ancestors? We all carry, I’m guessing, an image of an old man by a fire, telling stories, but for Bruce, his grandfathers, as he put it, “tolerated kids.” One would smile at him but wouldn’t actually talk, let alone tell stories. The other, he told me, didn’t speak to him at all—and in fact, he wouldn’t even look at him.
My mother, who died in 2022, didn’t talk about her heritage. Judging by what her brother could tell me, I doubt she knew much more than him. I grew up with her and Bruce’s parents in my life—my grandmother Evelyn, whom I called Beepa, and my grandfather Verdun, a veteran of the Second World War—but from what I remember, no one ever talked about their parents, my mother’s grandparents. Both her grandfathers died long before I was born, and I was five by the time both of her grandmothers died. I remember neither of them.
But near the end of her life, as her Parkinson’s advanced, my mother began to talk about Grams, her mother’s mother. My mother, in moments, became a child again, thinking she would be late for visiting her grandmother, saying that Grams was waiting for her. I’d listen quietly. I could tell by how my mother talked about Grams that this was an important woman, probably as important as my own grandmother, Evelyn, whom everyone called Evie, was to me.
Eva was my great-grandmother’s name, born Eva Maud Fuller in 1894. I’d only learned her name but a few years before—again, my mother never talked about her in my lifetime—and she died when I was only a year old. My mother, toward the end of her life, would tell me things about her grandmother, and Eva sounded a lot like my grandmother, a generous woman. I was sorry I couldn’t have known her.
My mother, Sandy, grew up in Salamanca, in western New York. It was only near the end of her life that I began to learn how far back her family extended there, especially on her mother’s side. I don’t think she ever knew how many of her ancestors were buried there, in the Wildwood Cemetery, between the railroad tracks and the Allegheny River.
I knew that my grandmother’s father, Herman Herrick, was an engineer on the B&O railroad. My mother said that at the end of the workday, he would come along the tracks in the train, and the kids would run to the end of Pine Street, where the Herrick’s house was, to wave to him when he blew the horn.
My mother, born in the late spring of 1947, is the oldest of three children. Her brother Bruce is only a few years younger, and my aunt Nan was born much later, in 1958. Nan lives in New York, up around Syracuse, a good distance from where I live in Louisville. But Bruce lives closer, only six hours away. And Bruce, I know, knew things about the family.
In mid-May, I drove to Asheville with my questions. I wanted to interview Bruce and learn more about my mom’s side of the family. I wanted to know, most of all, what he could tell me about more distant ancestors. Not a lot, it turned out. This is not unusual in our country.
My uncle, Bruce Monroe, lives in Asheville, and my mother’s cousin, David Donahue, lives on a mountainside above Weaverville, not far from Bruce’s. I left Kentucky on a Wednesday, in intermittent rain, headed southeast toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I headed first for David’s house, where I would stay for five nights. David is retired, a former government worker with Social Security, and he’d purchased the land on which he’d had his house built a number of years before. To save money, I brought my own food, leftovers from the week before, coffee, fruits and kale for smoothies in the morning. I didn’t want to trouble him, though he was glad to have me.
I arrived in the late afternoon and settled in. In the evening, I sat with David and began to unpack the box of photographs I’d brought, some dating back to the 1920’s. There were faces I was trying to identify, relatives I didn’t know who continually cropped up in the photos, all of which I’d gotten from my mother before she died. David is a cousin on the Herrick side—his mother and my grandmother were sisters—and he’s about Nan’s age, one of the youngest cousins. He didn’t know anything about the Monroe side—and that was the side I was looking at the most for that trip.
Arthur and Vurden Monroe, Little Valley, New York, probably late 1940’s-early 1950’s
The Monroe’s, in fact, are the more mysterious side. Of all my great-grandparents, they are the only ones not from New York, though they moved at some point to Salamanca—no one today knows when, really, or why. They came from Indiana: Thelma Lee Henson was born in French Lick in 1899, and Arthur Epherham Monroe was born in Scott County in 1898. I wanted to know, for one, how they met; they were born some fifty miles apart.
While Dave and I sat on the couches, a family of bears passed by in the driveway. We went to the front step to see the mother and two cubs. They watched us, unaffected.
Monroe House, Little Valley Road, probably 1943
My uncle Bruce has always seemed to me like his father: a reticent man, soft-spoken, mild by temperament. But I don’t remember him from when I was young; by the time I began staying at my grandparents’ house in Salamanca, where my parents left me each time they moved from New York to Kentucky to Texas to New Jersey, all in the span of only three years, my uncle was already long since moved out. He lived for a time in Austin, Texas—he played drums in a number of bands—before moving back to Western New York, where he became a truck driver.
He’d served in the Navy, and for his career he drove trucks across the country. He and my aunt Patty—and my two cousins, Jessica and Sara—lived in a trailer out in the country, which he eventually put down on a foundation and crafted into a house. Now he lives southeast of downtown Asheville, not far from the Swannanoa River and the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The first day I drove down to see Bruce with Dave, and I brought the box of photographs. He identified the white house I had in several small Brownie photos—the Monroe’s on Little Valley Road, dating to around 1916. I quickly learned that several people I had initially thought might be the Herrick’s were actually my other great-grandparents, Thelma Lee and Arthur Monroe.
I took notes. Arthur made jewelry boxes in a shed behind that house, selling them to vendors in New York City. Before that, when the family lived in Indianapolis, he and Verdun had worked on Arthur’s HVAC company together. Arthur was an inventor that never patented his inventions, which included paper blinds, fluorescent paint, and a “cookie-cracker stacker” that he sold to the company that became Nabisco. Arthur taught himself math, Bruce said, and in his study kept a drawing board where no one was allowed. Arthur could have been a millionaire, Bruce said.
Bruce said that his grandfather didn’t like children. For the most part, he never heard his grandfather speak. As for his grandmother, he said she would talk, but when she did she would never make eye contact. Despite all this, Verdun was close to his family, which Bruce described as “clannish.” They had no friends outside of immediate family.
I have no idea what my mother would have thought of them. She never once mentioned the Monroe’s, not even in passing.
The second day I went to Bruce’s house, we were alone. My aunt Patty had left for the beach, and Dave was off on Saturday errands. We settled into more conversation, and what I heard was disconcerting.
There was something of each Monroe I learned—my grandfather, and his parents—that I’d not known, never could have known, and, it occurred to me, would be utterly lost if I was not there to hear, write down, and remember.