It’s late May and I’m exhausted.

For Memorial Day we set out to visit my father in law for few days. During that visit I hopped over to my hometown and met with my family. I wanted to give them the full story from my lips and take questions. I didn’t know just how much was getting through in my emails to everyone.

I pulled up the charts.

I lined up the photos for comparison. I presented the story of Charles Francis Muller.

My Aunt and Elizabeth Muller

Charles at 22, in his mid 60s, and his early 40s. We separated them this way for comparison purposes.

I knew some of them were skeptical; unless you’ve done the research you can only judge the idea on its merit. It sounds too fantastical; these sorts of things happen to other people, right? It might even be a little insulting to imply someone’s father was a criminal.

You have to understand, I explained, Charles wasn’t your thug-with-a-gun type of criminal. In fact, his prison record speaks glowingly of him. He had status, schooling, and seemed to be of small privilege. He was also a dreamer and a speculator. This sounds an awful lot like Clyde when you hear his children talk about him. No, I insisted. He was guilty of forging a check. A lot of them, actually. I never got the sense he was a mean person, though. Just a writer of bad checks.

And that’s when my Aunt turned to her brother and asked, “Do you remember when the sheriff came to the house?” He remembered, but not why.

“I heard him say ‘I need to speak to your husband about some checks he wrote.’ Then Mama shooed us out of the room.” For my Aunt it suddenly became real. Before then it all seemed so fantastical, so unlikely that her Daddy could have been this criminal. But now his past was open to her. She mused out loud how sorry she was. She could have met her grandmother. It became real at that moment and she took from it a wistful kind of sadness. Sometimes knowing is painful and I hated being the one to deliver it. But the resemblance between her and the eldest Muller daughter was too hard to ignore. They were believers now.

And so I hopped back into the van and left my hometown once more. I needed some time to think. I needed a break.

This genealogy obsession gnaws at me every night as I go to bed. I lie awake, music softly pouring over me in an attempt to lure me from my more lucid moments into another realm of thought. You see, in my dreams I’m walking through buildings, mostly empty, sometimes full, looking for something or someone. I know I’m looking even as I have other adventures. Always there’s a sense I should move on, open another door, ask another question. Genealogy has a way of doing that to a person. When I got stuck once before and reached out via the message boards, I was rescued by a fellow enthusiast who warned “this can be addictive.” She was right.

In the morning I roll out of bed and shuffle into my kitchen, make a pot of coffee, and think about what I’m going to look up when I have free time. Every day I do the same thing, but lately the topics have trickled off. There hasn’t been a new article or fact teased in over a week. Maybe things were winding down and there we’d stay until more proof appeared.

By this stage there’s little left to uncover apart from filler minutia. You know; the things that make up a life. Charles started a baseball team from the employees of the company for which he worked. He was vice president of the social club for the same company. He even spoke at the welcoming party for the new president of Mortgage and Securities Company, introducing the man.

But some of the smaller things have slipped away. I don’t know if he liked to go to plays, or if he took Mathilda to see one of the popular silent movies of the time. Did he take her to the first talkie for that matter? Did he wear a tie every day? I imagine him checking his hat in the mirror on the way out into the sultry New Orleans evening. He meets some friends for a game or a smoke, discussing Behrman’s or McShane’s governing style. They’re all caught up in the rush and the madness of the 20s, convinced as we were in the late 90s and early 2000s the good times could never end.

Mathilda must have spent her days working or at social events. I doubt she lived a lower class life considering what I read in the papers. While she doesn’t appear as much as Charles, she is present. Sadly women of the time often went by the husband’s name, rendering them anonymous. Young women could be written about in the paper if they were wealthy or pretty, nothing unusual even today. Older women got a mention for charitable work. But if you did something outrageous, like kill someone or steal a lot of money, you’re going to get mentioned. Mathilda sort of disappears until she remarries.

But I assume she got some enjoyment out of life. I hope she was happy. I can’t imagine the fear and uncertainty of losing my partner to prison or a disappearance. She must have moved on early, though. An article in late 1930 mentions her request for a divorce. I assume it was noteworthy due to the rarity of divorce, the notoriety of Charles’ act, or her social status. Perhaps it’s a combination of them all, but I don’t think she got it. When she married the son of a judge later in life she still had Muller as her name. Another mystery to ponder.

I try to slip into his mind, or the version of his mind I created in my own. I imagine being him. Charles, and by extension Clyde, was a dreamer. The big plans made late at night over coffee and cigarettes brought a gleam to his eye, even as the missing pieces shouted for restraint. Like me these men sometimes didn’t stop and consider all the possible outcomes.

He kept at it, though. He did what he could to survive during the worst decade of our Union. More he had a family doing it. From what his children tell me he didn’t complain. He exuded an enjoyment of life and a fondness for laughter. By all accounts he loved his family in spite of the one he lost. I’m sure he missed his old life, but the price for his freedom was total rebirth. And he threw himself into this new life, making the most of it for the next 35 years. Family can do a lot for a soul.

Every year my wife’s family gathers on the coast of North Carolina to relax, play games on the beach, assemble puzzles, cook meals every night,  and set off an occasional firework. You hear about families unable to spend more than two days together before ending with bloody fists and tire marks. That’s not us. Everyone is free to mix in or out of most activities or none at all. Then we all gather at the end of the day, one family cooks a meal, and we laugh about the day. It’s great. There are no expectations and thus everything is fulfilled.

On the Monday of our vacation I opened my laptop to pull the morning’s email. The deeper I fell into this ancestry business the more often pulling email became an exciting event.  An email from Ray, our DNA contributor, sat there in bold. Being a “rip the band aid off” kind of guy I click the link. There in the opening sentence read: “My DNA results came in this morning and we are in fact cousins!”

I let out a whoop at the breakfast table and did a little seated dance. Bringing up the DNA results page there he was! A 3rd cousin, exactly where he should be if Clyde was Charles. Ray asked me later that week “weren’t you already sure before you asked me?” Honestly, yes I replied. But it would never be definitive without a test. I wanted to be sure before I swore to his children.

And just like that the search was over.