My father died suddenly last night.
As a genealogist, I am immersed constantly in the circle of life - wading through death records, obituaries, and wills and visiting cemeteries are all a normal part of a day’s work. And it’s very easy to forget that these documents, so valuable to family historians, belong to a person who lived - and who died. A person who worked. A person who danced. A person who laughed. A person who loved. A person who had a family - a family who, when that person died, whether old or young or tragically or suddenly or after a long illness - grieved.
Every now and then I am brought back to that reality - there are documents that record deaths so sad or tragic that I remember, this was a person. They lived, and now they are gone. For me, genealogy is more than tracing family trees - it’s paying tribute to those lives lived, no matter how long or short, no matter how well or not. My job is to find people - and to see them and acknowledge, I know you were here.
I have a lot of my dad in me. He was an avid reader and a history buff. He was a world traveler. He enjoyed a good beer. He loved movies and television and the media (he spent almost 50 years working in the television industry - he even won an Emmy.) He loved his family. He passed all these loves along to me. He saw my love of family history and developed his own interest in it, researching his side of the family and giving me a starting point from which to carry on. He’s one of the only people who would listen to me gush about my latest family tree discovery not only without his eyes glazing over but with actual interest. He’s one of the only people I ever met who loved cemeteries as much as I do.
He was my biggest supporter - I’m a writer and he knew I had more stories in my head and he always encouraged me to write them down and get them out. I went through some rough patches when I was younger and he was always there, no judgment and no questions asked.
Neither of us was big on talking about our feelings but we bonded over genealogy. And watching football together, even though were rooted for different teams - he taught me to love the game. For better or for worse, my kids are Jets fans because of him and every Sunday they would cheer J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, Jets! for their Pop Pop, even though we don’t live with him anymore.
I’m grateful my children knew him and were as close to their Pop Pop as they were, even though we moved away 3 years ago. We lived in the downstairs apartment of his house until my youngest was a year and a half, and I loved that my kids got to see him every day. I loved the symmetry that my children spent their first years in their grandparents’ house, just as my father spent his first years living with his parents in the same house as his grandparents (and great-grandmother).
Life ends, and life goes on. It always does. But today my heart hurts. And I hope in 100 years when future generations in my family are working on our family tree and come across a death record - maybe my dad’s - they will remember that it belonged to a person. A person who worked. A person who danced. A person who laughed. A person who loved. A person who had a family - a family who, when that person died, grieved.
Love you, Dad, bigger than the universe <3
Timothy James Gorry
1952-2020
