‘Feeling’ Genealogy: A Personal Essay

Jersey City by Zapista OU

But here it is: prepare
To see the life as lively mocked as ever
Still sleep mocked death. Behold, and say ‘tis well!
The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.18-20

My father’s obituary was simple. It read, “Charles D. Marsh/Garretson, 53, a lifelong resident of Jersey City passed away on May 3rd, 2020, at Hoboken University Hospital.” 

No one sent me his obituary. I don’t even know who wrote it. I Googled his name over and over for days until it appeared, and I earnestly read and reread each word, hoping that something about him would be revealed to me that wasn’t revealed to me when he was alive. A lifelong resident of Jersey City. I imagined what it meant to live in that place for fifty three years: as a boy, then as a father, and then as a man whose family went elsewhere. It was an indulgent and interpretive practice, a genealogical myth-making that I fell into simply because I wanted more from this single sentence.  

It was all so neat. In this obituary, his life had a clear beginning, middle, and end, the way all good narratives have. He was born. He lived in Jersey City. And then he died. These are the same beats we have from lives lived centuries ago. They are carved into gravestones instead of Google, but their purpose remains the same: to record and to archive. There’s a strange level of comfort in these documented certainties, especially given that the certainties of someone’s actual life—whether they lived in 1520 or 2020—remain largely elusive. 

In my own academic work, I am constantly asking questions concerning the study of the past, particularly as it relates to genealogy. I define genealogical practice as work that records the process of change and continuity. It gives me a perspective into a telos that isn’t necessarily linear or progressive. Instead, it is an interpretive practice that is contingent and never truly complete, whether you’re researching a family tree or the origin of an idea. It requires an inherent critical perspective on history and causality. In this type of work, I ask and revisit questions like: What does responsible genealogical research look like? How can I confront my interests with a genealogical perspective without unduly romanticizing, narrativizing, or mythologizing this research? How do I stop myself from participating in fruitless speculation? 

With the death of my father, though, I am confronting what genealogy feels like. It doesn’t feel like a practice or a methodology, but instead something deeply heuristic. My father’s obituary makes his loss a literal presence. His entire life is set before me in a single sentence. He is not here, but these words are. This obituary is him and is not him. Here, genealogy feels like the rediscovery of something gone. Genealogy feels like memory.

A lifelong resident of Jersey City. I remember climbing the hills at Mosquito Park after eating too many cheeseburgers with him at White Mana Diner. I remember my father in that same park twenty-five years earlier in 1970, when he was three, climbing those gigantic buffalo statues. Feeling genealogically, time collapses and I imagine I could remember his memories, now mingled and mixed with my own. 

* * *

I’ve always thought about genealogy in quite specific terms. Through genealogical research, we can trace an individual lineage or a particular idea, but not slippery feelings, impressions, or broad experiences. The latter requires access to social and contextual information that genealogical records like family trees, marriage records, obituaries, and death certificates don’t often account for on their own, except . . . 

Except for stories. After my father died, the image of Hermione becoming reanimated at the end of The Winter’s Tale has circled my mind again and again. Shakespeare’s play is fundamentally a play about time and its cycles. Time is even a character in the play. The story takes place over the course of sixteen years, which is a tremendous time scale for an early modern production. Many playwrights of the period were still invested in the Aristotelian concept called the “unity of time,” which argues that the action of a play should take place over no more time than a single day. Throughout The Winter’s Tale’s sixteen-year plot, lives are cut short, generations are severed from their origins, and relationships re-blossom in what feels like no time at all.

Perdita by Frederick Sandys

When The Winter’s Tale begins, King Leontes falsely accuses his wife, Hermione, of adultery. As a result of her imprisonment and trial, their young son Mamillius dies of distress. Hermione then dies of grief over her son’s death. Finally, their newborn daughter, Perdita, is taken away to Bohemia where she can be safe from her father’s wrath. After sixteen years have passed, the play ends when a repentant and somber Leontes is taken to see a statue made in the likeness of his late wife. In a cathartic and theatrical turn, the statue comes to life, and Hermione is alive once again.

Hermione’s statue is a genealogical object that disrupts positivism. It also rejects clear narrativization. Her statue is both fixed and fluid. It’s a feeling object that captures not just the likeness of Hermione at the time she died but also the passage of time itself. When first gazing at Hermione’s image, Leontes says, “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems” (5.3.27-28). Yet, he recognizes that this Hermione is still Hermione. However, perception, memory, time, context, and all the things that work upon and complicate a genealogical record is accounted for in her latent image.

Like my father’s obituary, Hermione’s statue asks us to attribute life to a seemingly non-living thing. Though we do not believe the statue is alive, the potential for its livelihood re-enchants Hermione’s seemingly dead image. When Leontes pleads, “O, she is warm / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating,” he is unconcerned with the matter of her body—that is, whether it is artificially or naturally composed—and is instead moved by the characteristics that lifeless and lifelike objects share (5.3.109-111). There is something of Hermione in the statue, just as there is something of my father in his obituary. They are both representations of life, but are not life itself. 

Scene from Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale by William Hamilton

We share in the enchantment of Hermione’s transformation as we witness Leontes surrendering himself to affect. To feeling genealogically. To witnessing her as a lived history, a bittersweet present, and as a lost future all simultaneously. Whether or not we recognize the actor’s lively body veiled beneath the artifice of the statue, the magic of witnessing Hermione’s reanimation is not in the life her body suddenly embodies but in the potential and process of the transformation itself. 

* * *

It’s been four months since my father died. I mark each month since his passing in the same way: with an exasperated disbelief that any time has passed at all. Between his death and living under quarantine, I know time passes more than I feel time passing: I can count the dates on a calendar but can’t articulate the felt difference between May 3rd and September 3rd. I’ve witnessed all the months, days, and hours in between but the continuum seems barely perceivable. 

The Winter’s Tale, though, provides me some relief. It makes explicit the feelings I find so difficult to pin down. In Act 4 of the play, Time itself appears to explain the drastic sixteen-year time jump in the plot. Time notes that it passes “The same I am ere ancient’st order was / Or what is now received,” arguing that even in the theater, Time passes as it always has though it may not feel like that is the case (4.1.10-11). According to Time, it has the power to overwhelm law and custom, which means that sixteen years passes us by in what feels like moments. Once we realize all the time that’s passed, the play moves from being a fixed and representational portrayal of grief and loss to an expansive and reflective piece on the ways these feelings make reality surreal. 

It is a play very conscious of how it is spending our time, even if we are not conscious of it ourselves. For me, feeling genealogically looks similar to this practice. It feels like witnessing and being witnessed in return. I’m not uneasy to exist in a world where my father no longer exists himself, but I do feel like I’m now taking up a space that was once his, witnessing what he now cannot, including himself.

Writing these words in my own home in Pittsburgh, I am accompanied by every year of his fifty three years in Jersey City. I feel his presence within me in a way I never felt when he was alive. Through his death, I become his reanimation. His final theatrical gesture.