From Here to Paternity

prodded at the fire Mel had started before taking the boys back to his place. “I was talking to Mel about being homesick. I guess that’s what started me thinking about it. We can go anywhere in the world now and not be too far from contact with those we left behind. Even if you’re a missionary in the Andes, you can still walk down the mountain to a town and send a fax or make a long-distance call. But when all those immigrants came here, they were really leaving behind everything and everybody they knew. If you left some little village along the Rhine to move to St. Louis or some place, you could pretty well count on never seeing the people at home again. Your parents, maybe. Brothers and sisters. You could write—if you knew how—but letters could take months to get back and forth, if they made it at all. You’d leave knowing you wouldn’t be able to go to your mother’s funeral or ever see your sister’s next baby—“
    Shelley shook her head. “Not necessarily. That’s one of the things the teacher talked about in that beginner’s class I took the other day. It’s something called chain migration. A town would sometimes collect the money to send some representatives of a couple of families to America to find a suitable place to move to. Then, once the place was chosen, they would follow along in a chain. The young bachelors first, to buy land and build a few houses, then some young families, and eventually the older generation. Sometimes, the teacher said, virtually the entire town moved itself halfway around the globe.“
    Jane smiled. “That’s interesting. And it makes me feel better about it. I’m going to have to call my mother when we get home and see what she knows about our family’s history.“
    “Aha! You’re hooked.“
    Jane sipped her wine. “Well, maybe a little.“
    “Let’s look at Doris’s file.“
    Jane went and got it and, removing the papers, put them into tidy piles. The first pile was the census reports, which Shelley enjoyed as much as Jane had. “Look at the size of the families!“ she exclaimed. “Good Lord! Here’s a woman who says she’s forty-six years old, and she has a four-year-old child at home as well as a twenty-four-year-old and a dozen in between! Twenty years of steady childbearing.“
    Jane was studying another sheet. “This one’s odd. The mother is twenty-seven, but there’s a child of fifteen. That doesn’t seem likely.“
    “It doesn’t seem nice , either,“ Shelley said. “No, look. The husband is forty. I’ll bet these older ones are his children from a previous marriage. At least I hope so. See, the children are fifteen, thirteen, eleven, and then there’s a gap, then a six-year-old and a three-year-old.“
    “I wonder who she was looking for on these,“ Jane said. “There isn’t any highlighting or notation on the back of any of the reports. Where are they from?“
    Shelley shuffled the papers. “One from a township in New York State. One from Denver—no, two from Denver. And one that looks like a farm community in Colorado someplace.“
    “How can you tell it’s a farm community?“ Jane asked.
    “For one thing, all the men give their occupation as farmer.“
    Jane laughed. “I think that’s a good way of guessing. I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a genealogist. Do you see any names that mean anything to you?“
    Shelley ran a finger down the left column of each page. “I don’t think so. Some of the names in the farm one look vaguely Russian or Slavic, but no Romanovs or even a Smith.“
    As Shelley folded up the census reports, Jane handed her the pile of clippings and photos. “Some of these aren’t even in English,“ Shelley complained.
    “No, but they each have a number written on the back. There are translations in the stack of paperwork. Most are Romanov cousins and people from Holnagrad, according to Doris’s translations.“
    “Here’s an obituary of Gregory Smith.“
    “Yes, but don’t get excited,“ Jane warned her. “It doesn’t tell much of anything about him. Just that he came from Europe and arrived in the community in the 1920s. Most of it’s about his late wife, who was connected to the town. I’d guess that either Bill or his sister gave the information to the paper, and they either didn’t know much more or were respecting their father’s lifelong secrecy and didn’t say what they knew.“
    “I wonder if this Sergei person in the portrait photograph with the Tsar is supposed