The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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Kyle D. Stedman, Rockford University

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Artist's Statement

Alexandra Hidalgo (2016) writes, "If we are going to write passionate, electrifying scholarship—and I believe those are characteristics we need to value in our research—we are likely to find much of it inside closets and under beds." This visual essay follow's Hidalgo's advice, both in its personal style and the texts consulted to make it: thousands of pages of letters, journals, and scrapbooks kept in my family's closets, under our beds.

My focus is the physicalities and uncertainties inherent to archival research, especially the personal and affective experience of using family archives—a term that in my case includes all the documents my family has informally saved over the years, in line with the “broadening [of] what ‘counts’ as an archive” described by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (2008, p. 9). I bring you along on this experience by eschewing traditional models of scholarly argument in favor of visual and juxtapositional logics. That is, the written words here are as important as the photos, GIFs, video clips, and audio interspersed throughout (all described fully with transcripts and alt-text). The essay's structure works by putting my life, my ancestors' lives, and scholarly texts in close proximity to each other for the audience to find intersections that are most meaningful to them, rather than me insisting on the proper meaning of the work, thereby "leading to unique inventional possibilities across disparate types of media," as Amy K. Anderson's (2017) essay on juxtaposition puts it ("Juxtaposition, the Digital Invention Box, and the Multimodal Gutter" section, para. 1). I hope you'll notice resonances I never even intended.

Finally, I hope my work embodies what Ames Hawkins (in press) describes as creative-critical scholarship, which "grapples with that which is unexpressed, points toward that which is unrecognized, and strives to articulate the affective and ineffable knowledge with and through creative processes as they intersect with critical practice." My goal is for the essay, paradoxically, to take steps toward that "affective and ineffable knowledge" while simultaneously stepping away from expressions of clarity and certainty. It's like boating on a river: sometimes you feel in control, and sometimes you simply follow where the current takes you.

Figure 1: It's okay if you want to pause and watch the water for a few seconds before you start reading. GIF made by the author from "Wheat's Worth" (1920).

 

This is a story about how river water moves, swirling in circles when it encounters the islands in its path. And it's about how we perceive those islands—whether from above, like a map, or by getting our feet dirty, kneeling at the edge of the bank to dip our fingers into the water's vortex.

This is also a story about the soil on those islands, so black and abundant, slowly consuming everything it covers, in its own time. And it's about how, like that island soil, we become what we consume—all that water, all those fallen leaves, all that produce from the land, how it's part of us, now and long after our bodies have broken down and transformed into something else.

If you look carefully, standing on an island in a river, you can see past, present, and future at once. You can lament over what's been and fear for what will come again. So this is finally, too, a story about how we know what we know, through archives and papers that can never quite tell us everything we want to learn about what has been and what will be.

***

Brown's Island is a skinny stretch of land in the Ohio River between two states, about two and a half miles long, with bridges jutting out to Ohio and West Virginia, like a canoe with its paddles sticking out.

At a press conference in early 2023, the promotional board below showed the past, present, and future of the island, according to the redevelopment firm that currently owns the land. The "present" slide in the middle looks accurate: it's a mostly empty space, covered with stones of gray gravel, probably the result of when the island was covered in slag in 1971 in anticipation of a coke plant that a steel mill was building.

 

Figure 2: Three panels showing the past, present, and future of Brown's Island on a promotional board by Weirton Frontier Crossings. Photograph by the author.

 

Or at least it seems empty at first. The image on the left showing the island's industrialized past doesn't go back very far; it doesn't dig very deep beneath that slag, to where the worms move and the decomposition of the past waits for a burst of oxygen. That image doesn't go back to the white farmers who worked that land before steel production ever began, to the Black enslaved peoples who cleared it before them, or to the Shawnee, Kaskaskia, Osage, Monongahela and other indigenous peoples who lived on and visited the island before them.

The image also doesn't have space to acknowledge my family—my great-great-great grandparents Lyman and Emily Stedman. They moved onto Brown's Island along with their two young children, Blanche and Audubon, on Christmas Eve, 1858, and stayed there for the rest of their lives, until Emily died in 1895 and Lyman died in 1916. Three more kids were born on the island—kids who must have played in the barn, dug for arrowheads, thrown rocks into the water, wandered too close to the edge, and stood at the head of the island looking north toward Pittsburgh, watching the waters part around them to the east and west, feeling like powerful gods of river, and of time itself.

 

Figure 3: Lithograph showing Lyman Stedman's farm in the 1870s, from Hayes (1877).

 

It was a place of abundance, supporting my ancestors with its livestock and produce through multiple generations. Some days, reading their letters and journal entries, I'll feel the same sun and wind they describe, and I want to be there so much it hurts.

 

Figure 4: Photograph of the Stedman family house on Brown's Island, from the author's family collection.

 

***

Reading archival documents can hurt in other ways, too. Some days, since I know what's going to happen to all of them and that island, I can barely stand to read about all their work, everything they build and grow. I'll be sitting at my desk, reading what they wrote, touching the same paper they touched, when I'll remember the full future to come—the coke plant, all that slag—and I'll feel a pressure in my chest like I'm drowning.

Like this: in a pile of family photos, I came across one naming three horses: Whisker, Skippy, and Beppo.

 

Figure 5: Three horses from the Stedman farm on Brown's Island. From the author's family collection.

 

It didn't seem like that big a deal, one photo in a pile of dozens, I don't even know much about horses.

But Lyman Stedman kept a journal, where he described his day-to-day activities farming on Brown's Island. And as I read it, I saw the names of these horses come up, the ones I had already seen in a photo, giving me that jolt of pleasure in finding a new connection that any archival researcher is addicted to. After reading the journal, this wasn't just some random horse named Whisker—it was the Whisker who "nearly ran me down" one day as they "marked out potato ground," and so on.

And as happens to any farm animal, they die: they find Whisker in the barn one day, unable to get up; they bury him in a hole in the bank between the barnyard and the river fence. Later that same year, they're forced to shoot Beppo, too, burying him in the bank as well. I don't know if they marked the graves or not.

Philosopher Kathleen Wider writes, "We are alone neither here nor in the grave" (Wider, 2008, p. 72). Wider is writing about our connections to our cultural and temporal contexts; she's not talking about physical community with others in the grave, I think. Yet I'm thinking of the soil beneath all that slag on Brown's Island, the graves of those horses who I got to know through my time in my family archives. Stretching Wider's meaning a bit, we could say that they're not alone either, there in their graves in the river bank, even after their molecules have broken down and joined with others, eventually being snatched by the Ohio River to join others downstream. They're still with each other, and with those earlier Stedmans, and with me, as I read about them and zoom in as much as possible on the scan I made of their photograph, memorizing every detail.

 

Figure 6: Life struggling to grow through the gravel on Brown's Island. Photograph by the author.

 

***

I first learned about Lyman Stedman's journal on Google. There it was, a reference to it at least, online, in the archival listings at West Virginia University: five years of daily entries about his life as a farmer from 1880-1885, when he was in his 50s. Even better: people have read it and cited it; scholars came to WVU and read my ancestor's journal, chewing and digesting it until it became something new, for others to read.

 

Figure 7: Clockwise from upper left: screenshots from "Lyman Stedman" (n.d.), Martin (2015, p. 13), and Crawford & Brown (1964, pp. 287 & 300).

 

Once I was visiting my aunt, my dad's sister. I mentioned Lyman's journal in passing, and she replied, "Do you want to see the other ones?"

"Wait, there are more?" I asked.

"Oh sure," she said. She fetched a cardboard drawer from another room, and inside were sixteen journals total, dating from 1849 to 1920.

 

Figure 8: Sixteen journals, each filled with entries about farm life, mostly on Brown's Island, 1849-1920. Photograph by the author.

 

On the top of the stack was a clean, neatly folded letter, dated July 10, 1968, from WVU Library curator J. William Hess to my grandfather Allan. Hess writes that the 1880-85 journal, the one referenced online and quoted by others, doesn't seem to be the only one Lyman wrote. In that letter, Hess asks, "Do you possibly have any of the other diaries, or do you have knowledge of the location of any others?" My grandfather kept that question folded so neatly atop that pile of sixteen more journals; he must have seen it every time he opened the drawer.

 

Figure 9: Letter from WVU curator to my grandfather. From author's family collection.

 

I've corresponded with WVU's librarians; they don't have any record that my grandfather ever answered the letter.

Think of the abundance of content in that drawer, waiting to be read and connected to other ideas and histories. It makes me think of the thousands of kernels of corn that can grow from a single seed, but buried too deep to grow, where no one outside my family could ever access it.

***

Scholar Betsy Birmingham (2008) insists that archival researchers can "help the dead, who do not know they are dead, finish their stories." The way Birmingham tells it, we don't help the dead finish those stories dispassionately, through scientific facts, but instead "in the moment in which we realize that their stories are ours" (p. 144).

Here's creative-critical scholar Ames Hawkins (2019) walking to the edge of a similar point: "Why is it that in reading letters that have nothing directly to do with me I usually come away with a different, perhaps even deeper, understanding of myself?" (p. 86)

I grew up all over—in San Diego, southeast Virginia, Orlando—often in new or next-to-new houses. It felt like everyone there had come from somewhere else. If where we're born and raised is intimately tied to who we are, then I'm not someone who knows anything about farming, or soil, or even basements, which I never grew up having. I always stayed on the surface.

It feels different in Rockford, Illinois, where I live now, a Midwestern city trying to make a post-industrial identity for itself. Walking downtown, the buildings proclaim the years they were built: 1912, 1907, 1889, 1879—not long ago in the vast river of human history, but older than anything I grew up seeing. If you squint, you can imagine those are the years you're living in. Walk a bit further north of downtown and you can visit mounds on the riverside built by unidentified indigenous people perhaps as far back as 700 CE; look at the trees and the Rock River from the right angle, and you're there and then, too.

 

Figure 10: Two buildings in downtown Rockford. What year is it again? Photograph by the author.

 

Figure 11: One of the mounds in Rockford's Beattie Park. Photograph by the author.

 

A lot of scholars have ideas about why people research family histories, especially white, privileged people like me. It's "a reflexive response to a sense of loss that underpins modern society" (Santos and Yan, 2010, p. 56) or a search for "coherence as part of the mastery of life" (Yakel, 2004, Introduction section, para. 3), or "a longing for an enlarged and more significant way of thinking about [our]selves" (Jackson, 2021, p. 159). You get it—we live untethered, isolationist lives, like islands in a river, so of course some of us feel the need to build bridges out to discover our pasts and create meanings for ourselves.

But here's a quote that washes over me more than most: an acknowledgment of "the psychological, moral, and cultural complexities of ascribing oneself to land where one has no 'ancient claim'" (Basu, 2002, as cited in Santos and Yan, 2010, p. 57). That "lack of an ancient claim" has me thinking about how much I moved around as a kid, of course, but also about the white settler spaces where those houses were built. What right did Richard Brown have to purchase Brown's Island in the first place, and which murderous systems and policies supported him, before that land was sold and sold again, eventually to my family? Some days I think being drawn to Brown's Island is a way to grab hold of a deeply planted family history I never felt growing up, those 61 years of Stedmans farming on the island—but on my worst days, I worry about the histories that led to their possession of it, wondering what right I have to claim it as my own. The best I can do is to acknowledge those complex histories, telling the stories of care that went into the land, each story a root I push through the slag to the soil beneath.

Maybe we're all uncertain. Rachel Jackson, in her coauthored piece on decolonial relationality (Jackson and Bratta, 2020), hints at her ongoing inability to fully know the places she inhabits. She writes, "I am an Indigenous woman. I am from Oklahoma. I know its rivers and lakes like I know my own body—and yet both are also still mysteries to me" (Ayehli section, Process page, para. 9). Maybe the unknowability of the rivers and lands we dwell on is an inherent quality to life, even for those with fewer settler ethical problems in their past than I wrestle with. Maybe we were meant to love where we've been planted but never love it too much.

Of course, genealogy is also a reminder of the inevitability of death, as you make friends with long-gone people who you'll never meet on this earth. Maybe, deep down, studying my family's past is one way I acknowledge that I'll die too, leaving behind my own archives. It makes me wonder where I'll be buried—in the city where I live now, or where my parents live or once lived, or where their parents lived and died. There's so much soil waiting with open arms.

***

In a recent book on Brown's Island (Kraina & Zwierzchowski, 2022), the authors try to prove rumors that there was a burial mound on the island, including trying to track down someone, now dead, "who supposedly possessed an old map with a mark and writing indicating a Shawnee burial ground" (p. 127). Ultimately, they can't find any proof that the mound was there.

A few days ago, I was reading Lyman's journals, slowly making my way through all sixteen of them in that cardboard drawer. And there it is, in his entry for May 6, 1903: "Wheeled dirt from Indian Mound & filled up barn cistern." That's it, the only reference I've seen so far—such an everyday occurrence to him that he barely mentions it.

I don't know how to reconcile the two emotions that passage builds in me at the same time: the historian's elation at finding evidence for a rumor, and the horror of reading of another culture's sacred spaces so casually desecrated.

***

Growing up, every Memorial Day my dad's family drove an hour and a half from Massillon, Ohio to Toronto Union Cemetery to clean up the graves of the Brown's Island family. The cemetery is high on a hill, appearing suddenly after a final steep, sharp curve, laid out near a cliff where you can see Brown's Island in the distance, if the trees are bare. They raked the leaves, scrubbed the seven bronze grave markers, got yelled at if they wandered too close to the edge. 

 

Figure 12: My great-grandmother Minnie Layne Stedman visiting Toronto Union Cemetery in the 1950s with two of her grandchildren (my dad on the left). Photograph from the author's family collection.

 

I went to the cemetery for my first time on a cold-but-sunny March day, recreating the memory of Memorial Days past with my dad and aunt. We tried to clean the markers, spraying and scrubbing them with little success and wishing we had thought to bring a rake for last fall's leaves. We stood in just the right spots to replicate some historic photos, searched for the water pump, zipped our jackets tighter.

Join me, if you'd like, by hearing me scrub those stones.

Figure 13: My dad and aunt visiting Toronto Union Cemetery in 2023. Photograph by the author.

 

I Instagrammed a video of an earthworm making its way across Lyman's stone; it must have been wondering where its cover of disintegrating leaves had suddenly gone.

My dad's annual Memorial Day visits were part of a longer history. The first two Stedman graves were Audubon's wife and mother, Ella and Emily. In one of Lyman's journals, he writes about he and Audubon, father and son, visiting the cemetery together to decorate the graves of their wives the day before what he calls "Decoration Day" in May 1895. The journals show they continued visiting, and photos suggest that the tradition kept on going with later family. I don't know why I never went as a kid; I guess our trips to Ohio from out of state were already so short, and I'm sure I would have whined if I had to leave Grandpa's fun and mysterious basement to drive 90 minutes just to see some old graves. It must have felt easier to my parents to stay with the living, to stay on the surface.

***

Lyman and Emily's third child, Mabel, once found a handwritten note that Lyman had written in 1913 at age eighty-five, three years before he died, deep into the onset of his dementia-related final illnesses. "To my children," he writes, "On my decease, please bury my body in Toronto Cemetery by the side of my wife—Emily M. J. Stedman, on the north side." After his daughter Mabel found this note, she wrote on the flip side, in her distinctive handwriting, "Dad tore a leaf from some book and wrote this in 1913— . . . but his request to be buried on north side of mother—was forgotten, why he asked that—haven't least idea." 

 

Figure 15: Lyman's 1913 wish about where to be buried. From the author's family collection.

 

Figure 16: Mabel's note on the flip side of Lyman's handwritten note. From the author's family collection.

 

Lyman had stopped journaling six years before he wrote this note, having kept it up for fifty-eight years—but Audubon, at age fifty-nine, started the journal back up again in 1913, the year Lyman wrote his cryptic note. I've checked the journal for the day Lyman wrote the note, April 24, to see if there's any hint of why he wrote it, hoping for a story rich as the soil. Something like: "Pa uneasy today, with something clearly on his mind," or perhaps even "Pa spent the day reading a mystical book about the cardinal directions and the spirit's final resting places." But instead, there's only this: "Cultivating oat ground"—the same thing he wrote on both of the previous two days. He was too busy turning the island soil to leave much behind in writing. Who knows what made Lyman write the note and then forget to tell anyone about it, like rolling it into a bottle and tossing it into the Ohio River.

 

Figure 17: The layout of the seven Stedman graves in Toronto Union Cemetery. Lyman and Emily were married; three of their five children were Audubon, Mabel, and Chester. Ella was Audubon's first wife, and Faber was their first son. Photograph and annotation by the author.

 

When I visited the cemetery, I could see that, indeed, Lyman was buried to the immediate south of Emily. The north side was used next for their youngest child, Chester, the first of the children to die, just four months before Lyman passed in 1916. It seems unlikely that Lyman, sick and bedridden in his old age, made it up that steep hill to see Chester's grave, but even if he did, perhaps he was pleased to see just how far north of Emily they buried Chester—how there was clearly space for him to nestle between them to the north of his wife and south of his son, when it came to it, just as he wanted (a space his daughter Mabel would eventually take). But he was put instead on Emily's south side. So much abundant space to use, but not ordered to everyone's liking.

***

I've gathered boxes and piles and bags of family archives, now kept in the cedar closet in my attic. I'm the one who asks everyone to loan me this scrapbook, drop off that bag of letters, but now that it's all here I'm overwhelmed by what to do with it all. I can't scan every photo and every letter, can I? Should I? How do you choose?

Peeking into letters written to other people, I'm haunted by journalist Janet Malcolm's (2023) warning that "The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally" (p. 22). But I also know, with Malcolm, that "some of the drab little photographs" from our lives, "if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us" (p. 102). Or maybe a digestive metaphor is better than an aural one: if we chew on something long enough, it becomes part of us.

 

Figure 18: One of many pages from a disintegrating scrapbook, from the author's family collection.

 

Like these scrapbook pages, curated by some family member but I don't know which, filled with faces I don't at first recognize. Sure, that one in the upper left is labeled "me," but I don't know who the other people are at first, so the "me" doesn't help. I've got to move along and keep reading.

But we don't meet our ancestors by skimming, but by staring, by spending time, the way we know a river by sitting on a bench at its bank. That's how one photograph labeled "Chet's sister—Mabel" began to teach me how to see her. That is, now that I knew her face a little, surely that was her too in another photo, the person labeled the "bachelor," since Mabel never married. And wait, surely the "me" in the other photo was her, too —I recognize the face and the handwriting now! I just had to sit with her.

 

Figure 19: Two small photos from the author's family collection. The writing, in my grandfather Allan's handwriting, is on the back of the right photo.

 

Figure 20: Crop of a photograph showing Mabel, overlaid with part of her annotation on the flip side. From the author's family collection.

 

Figure 21: Photograph of Faber and Minnie Stedman with their grandson "Junior" and Aunt Mabel, circled. From the author's family collection.

 

Which means the disintegrating scrapbook has been hers all along, the whole thing, put together with her friends and family and face in mind. She posed for the camera like no one else in the family, eager to open herself up to its lens like the first shoots pushing through the soil. I could see her now.

I wish I could ask her about what she chose to include and exclude—why this postcard, who she liked most in that group, who took the photo of her on the hammock. If she were here now, maybe I'd ask her opinion on what Alexandra Hidalgo (2016) writes about how we archive photographs: "The photos we take and the ones we inherit or steal from family albums tell stories throughout our homes. How and where we choose to display them and the other photos and objects that accompany them are ways in which we weave our arguments about those we love (or don’t) and about our own place in a community of ancestors, relatives, friends, and at times even strangers." The second I pick up one of the crumbling pages of her scrapbook, I'm making decisions already about which images to scan, which to skip, wondering who I'll recognize and who I'm going to pass by without making eye contact.

 

Figure 22: Mabel relaxing. From the author's family collection.

 

Mabel never married. One source suggests that she had a suitor that she would only accept if he agreed to live on the island, so she could continue caring for her father after her mother's death; apparently, he didn't like the idea of being so close to all those currents. Instead, she stayed there until three years after Lyman died, when they sold the farm and she moved just upriver to a house she inhabited for almost thirty more years. Mabel ended up outlasting them all, both in life and in the photos in her scrapbook.

***

Part of me worries that this essay is too dark, that its obsession with death is worrisome, that my Mom is going to call me to ask if I'm alright.

I am alright, but I wish I knew how to help you understand—no, to feel—the experience of growing to love people through their documents only to see them inch closer and closer to the death you know is coming, just barely offstage, right before they tip into that final river.

For me it happened first with Chester, or as we call him, Uncle Chet. His final letters get shorter and shorter with shakier and shakier handwriting, written from bed as his tuberculosis worsens before it takes him and the letters just stop, age just 38, younger than I am now. Almost the last line he writes is a wish for more togetherness in the family: "we don't seem to be able to accomplish very much separately, any more," he writes.

Then there was Lyman's day-by-day account of Emily's final sickness, perhaps diverticulitis, which happened years before Chet died but which I read later. After days in bed, Emily gives a final show of life that gave hope to Lyman but couldn't give any to me, and then she was gone, too.

Then there's Audubon, often called Audie, my great-great grandfather, who journals about his various sicknesses for years, trying all kinds of doctors near and far, even as he struggles to manage an alcoholic farmhand and the sale of their half of the island. When it's finally done and he leaves the area to stay with a friend up near Ravenna, Ohio, he almost immediately gets into bed, never to get out again, leaving entry after entry in his journal until he doesn't.

 

Figure 23: Audubon Stedman thinking about his past, present, and future, probably sitting on Brown's Island. From the author's family collection.

 

Now, I'm slowly reading through the letters Mabel—often called Aunt Bell—wrote to my grandfather through the 1930s and 40s, but I'm dreading the letters from that final year. I don't see how I can go through it all again.

The thing is that I see past, present, and future all at the same time. I'm hovering over it all like a satellite taking pictures of an island for Google Maps. But I increasingly think that I'm not cut out to have the far-reaching sight of a god.

***

In her 80s, Mabel was rereading the letters her brother Chet wrote to her, long after his death. She describes the experience in a letter of her own, written in 1946: "rereading them broke me all up tore open the old hurt—is still so deep."

***

In one of Jody Shipka's video projects (2012), she includes a section called "Collaborating with the Dead," in which she excitedly tells the story of tracking down people pictured in a box of negatives she bought for $2 at a garage sale. Each discovery led to a new mystery and then even more discoveries, like names and addresses of places she knew and could visit, where she could interview living people about who she saw in the photos. It was electrifying.

But then she met with someone who told her that everyone in the photos was dead, all of them. Here's her response:

 

Shipka's voice says, "It's not an exaggeration to say that I was pretty devastated after our meeting. I had spent so much time—much of my spring and summer—with these images, with these image-people, and as I was now learning, these ghosts, only to find, or feel, like this was it. The end of the line, so to speak. After that meeting, I packed up the negatives and set them aside" (Shipka, 2012, 23:41-24:07).

***

It's hard to explain why I feel driven to find more family archival documents when I already have so many. My wife and I joke that I "like to do things completely," but it's more than that, too. Maybe it's a recognition that no matter how much I learn, I'm still always far away from actually knowing the real people I'm studying—a difference historian Carolyn Steedman (2009) writes about in "On Not Writing Biography." Yet the allure is there—the hope that with just a bit more content, I could begin to know them.

Take Lyman's journals—all sixteen, in that drawer from my aunt. I knew I was missing one from 1880-85, the one that disappeared after WVU scanned it for microfilm, but there were also two other gaps in the years: someone had the journal he wrote from 1855 to 1857, and another one he wrote from 1897 to 1902.

And I had to find them. My search led me to track down the cousin who loaned one to the WVU library (who died in 1971), a phone call to a funeral home to track down her daughter (who died in 2019), a phone call with that daughter's attorney, a phone call with who I thought was a granddaughter but who turned out to just be a foster child for less than a year, and a lot of anxiety. None of them knew anything about any journal; none of them thought it was likely it was still around. It was the end of the line—for me as a researcher, and for that branch of the family's descendants. I was sure the three missing journals were hidden in the back corner of an antique store somewhere, or glued shut with a hole drilled through them to make a book lamp or something.

Even now, today, the very day I'm drafting this for the first time, I swear, I've learned where two of them are: with a distant cousin I didn't know exists who wants me to have them, she'll drop them in the mail, it's no problem. Chet's words are rushing in my ears like a river: "we don't seem to be able to accomplish very much separately, any more." That's two of the three missing journals, and I'm trembling with excitement to read them, but there's still one more out there, and I'm sending people to search antique stores in Columbus, Ohio for it, I really am. Eighteen isn't enough; I want the full nineteen, the complete set, like a perfect row of corn planted in exact rows.

Here's Jody Shipka again, from another article (2021): she suggests that a new archival research project isn't about understanding the past as much as making something new from it; it's about—and she puts this in italics—"engaging with the past as it moves through the present always already on its way to becoming something, sometime, and somewhere else" (p. 122).

***

At home one day, I'm putting moisturizer on my face, and a bit spills onto my dresser. It's part of the bedroom set my parents used when I was young, but it was originally owned by my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my mother's mother's parents.

I swipe up the spilled moisturizer from that dresser like it's the last bit of frosting on a plate, and rub it deep into my forehead and neck. I don't think there's any residue left for others to find in the future, but who knows.

***

 

Figure 24: The east channel of the Ohio River around Brown's Island. Photograph by the author.

 

Mabel, Aunt Bell, was in the boat the day my Grandpa Allan was born. But it's a little unclear if he was born in the boat or on land. And somehow, that distinction feels like it matters.

In 1911, Mabel was caring for her aging father Lyman and older brother Audubon on Brown's Island. Mabel was close with her nephew, Audubon's oldest son Faber, who had married Minnie Layne from northern Kentucky just a few years earlier. In one letter, she calls Faber more of a brother than a nephew. Faber and Minnie lived an itinerant life in their early years together, traveling up and down the Ohio River to job sites where Faber could work on locks and dams.

Mabel was on Faber and Minnie's boat in early September 1911, a few miles north of the island. Mabel was 49, and the couple were both 35; it's easy to imagine that with temperatures in the mid-70s, it seemed like a good day to get away. Perhaps Faber and Minnie's first child Ella, nearly six, stayed home on the island, watching Grandpa dig up potatoes, pick apples, rake hay, and cut corn, or maybe she tried to tiptoe as close to the edge as she could without any adults noticing. My guess is that Mabel craved chances to talk to those younger people on the river, away from her chores, and that Minnie, extremely pregnant by now, needed the distraction of someone to talk to besides her husband.

But then, miles upriver from the island, the labor pains came. Here's how Allan told the story of his birth, years later:

 

Allan Stedman says, "And Mom suddenly started having pains, and uh, there was no hospital open anywhere except for in Steubenville, that was too far to go! She was upset and he was too, so he pulled up to New Cumberland and ran up the hill to the doctor's office that he found next door to the residence, and the doctor came and brought me into the world there at New Cumberland."

 

It's a story that's fun as a family legend but also strangely vague about if the birth itself was on- or off-shore. The boat was what Allan calls a "launch," something they actually lived in, so there was surely a bed, water, supplies. He could have been born there. And when my dad and I visited New Cumberland, we noticed how far up the river we were from Steubenville, how steep the banks were. We found the name of the doctor in the courthouse, and his house was indeed on the street near the river, so yes, they would have found him right away. 

 

Figure 25: The Ohio River and bank at New Cumberland, WV. Photograph by the author.

 

In any case, my grandfather Allan was born—maybe with the flow of the Ohio River mysteriously wrapped around his genes, maybe not. It feels right, though. One of Audubon's journals talks about Faber's family staying on the island a couple summers later while Faber helped out, and I love the image in my head of little Allan toddling around as an almost-two-year-old—like, I had never really thought of him as having been on the island, my own Grandpa. Think of all the crawling and falling he did there, skinning his knees, sticking his finger in ant holes before eating the dirt, and also hugging the dogs, feeding the horses, reaching through the fence slats to touch the pigs.

It reminds me of visiting Ohio in my own childhood summers, where I ate the fig newtons Grandpa left out for me, touched the same old family furniture he had touched, wrapped my mouth around the same spoons he had used thousands of times himself. I'm one step removed from the soil of Brown's Island; I always have been.

My dad and I found a bench in New Cumberland where boats could tie up, where men with pregnant wives could run up the steep bank. We ate lunch there, peanut butter sandwiches and apples, putting something of the location into ourselves, too.

***

By the way, I don't really know how the trip up the river was going before Allan's birth, just as I don't really know what his toddler summer on the island was like. I don't have documents attesting to that level of detail.

But here's Gesa E. Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster (2010) on the use of what they call the feminist critical imagination, which they describe with the metaphor of "tacking in" and "tacking out"—metaphors for sailing that describe your boat's relationship to the wind.

We associate “tacking out” analogically with the technologically enhanced ability to view Earth from satellites in outer space in order to gain the capacity to see, for example, that rivers, long since dry or shifted, once flowed—a “traces of a stream” metaphor in the extreme. To tack out, then, we stand in conscious awareness of what we have come to know by more traditional means and from that base use critical imagination to look back from a distance (from the present into the past, from one cultural context toward another, from one sociopolitical location to another and so on) in order to broaden our own viewpoints in anticipation of what might become more visible from a longer or broader view, where the scene may not be in fine detail but in broader strokes and deep impressions. (p. 651)

The work of recovering unheard voices—especially voices traditionally ignored in patriarchal scholarship—sometimes requires us to zoom in and out, to adjust ourselves in different relationships to the wind and the current. Using the critical imagination to fill in gaps that would otherwise be invisible can be a political move to give voice to those who would otherwise be silenced.

The thing is, there's still so much silence. Even when I'm drowning in the abundance of my family's archived documents—there's still so much silence.

***

Archive studies scholar Catherine Hobbs (2013) reminds us that "the archives are linked to a life. . . . Archives are material evidence of living in time and space, both by virtue of their physicality and their intellectual and physical interrelations" (p. 184).

With that talk of "intellectual and physical interrelations," she makes me want to eat Lyman's journals, and Audie's too, and then a bunch of Chet's letters and all of Aunt Bell's letters too, and I guess I could print my PDF of their sister Blanche's diary and swallow it, too, for dessert. I want to know what those interrelations really taste like in the moment.

Brown's Island isn't "my" land, and even though they worked it for sixty-one years, in some ways it wasn't really theirs, either, if you follow the deeds back to the first Europeans who claimed it as their own. But the words of my family, the stories they tell and the paper they wrote on, all those ink and pencil scratchings—those really are mine. And there's so much more to eat.

 

Figure 26: The soil I snatched from the north end of Brown's Island when no one was looking. Photograph by the author.

 

But forgive me if I do think of a little bit of that land as mine, as well—this bottle of soil I took from the very north end of the island. I gathered it using a rinsed-out ziplock that used to hold a peanut butter sandwich, turned inside out on my hand to scoop it up. I didn't want the slag, which felt too recent, too contaminated, so I scuttled a step or two down the bank to collect the soil that seemed older, like it had been there longer, more full of nutrients and history. The river sounded louder, the closer I got to the edge.

 

Figure 27: The north end of Brown's Island in 2023. Photograph by the author.

 

***

In 1856, Lyman was traveling on the Ohio River when he stopped briefly at Blennerhassett Island, which had once been the site of a mansion where Aaron Burr had plotted to overthrow the U.S. government. Lyman loved U.S. history, and those events hadn't really happened all that long ago for him; he knew the significance of this island.

Lyman wrote in his journal that he "walked over the upper end of it.— Stood upon the identical spot where Blannerhasset's [sic] Mansion was built—Nothing now left to mark the spot but a few fragments of brick—a Slight elevation of ground and a few walnut & locust trees—Strolled around the Island for an hour or more & pushed off—"

***

In an article about family archival research, compositionist Liz Rohan (2010) reminds me that everything isn't about the past, that I'm creating my own artifacts to be discovered by the future, too. (Even this essay, drafted and revised so many times? Have you found all its traces, you future reader looking back up the river?) Rohan writes, ". . . by living our lives, we are also living history" (p. 55).

I wonder if my grandpa was thinking this way when he left that letter from the WVU libraries on his pile of Lyman's journals, hoping that in the future I'd find it and donate the whole stack to them, finishing what he never could bring himself to do himself.

It's all too much to wrap my head around, but I admit I wonder what you're going to do with my little bottle of soil.

***

I've been reading a packet of letters written by Mabel in the last few years of her life, in her 70s and 80s, in the years before, during, and after World War II. They're all written to my grandfather Allan, his first wife Betty, and Allan's mother Minnie, who lived with them for a while. 

 

Figure 28: Some of the many letters Mabel wrote to her family in the 1930s and 1940s. Photograph by the author.

 

I like so much about Aunt Bell: her wit and playful love of a good "yarn," the glint of challenge in her eye in some of her photos, her closeness with her brother Chet and my great-grandfather Faber, her fierce anger at her great-niece's alcoholic husband. Yet I also pity her, especially all the deaths she experienced: losing her father and Chet in 1916, then her nephew Ray in 1919, then her lifelong home on Brown's Island after they sold it in 1919, and just a few months later, her brother Audubon in 1920, followed a few years later by Faber and her older sister Blanche in 1937. She lived a meager life, especially after complicated legal maneuvers led to very little inheritance and the necessity of hosting a niece and a nephew in her home for the last few years of her life, neither of whom, according to her letters, did much to help with household needs or expenses. "Sponges," she called them more than once.

 

Figure 29: My favorite photo of Mabel, from her disintegrating scrapbook. From the author's family collection.

 

Seeing her life as a complete, asynchronous whole can almost, but not entirely, help me feel gracious toward the angry, sick, and lonely woman I meet in these letters. She'll complain about something that seems justified—wishing for more visitors, her health, the unwillingness of the "sponges" to help out, sadness at losing a family member—and then she'll lament more, and more, and then in the next letter all over again, taking it from the top. When World War II starts, her letters get meaner, as her xenophobia and racism begin to surface, as well as her anger toward lawmakers in Washington, who she thinks should all be "shot." She seems like an elderly woman that I'd visit with high spirits, only to leave exhausted, like I was crawling out of a dark pool, filled with feelings of guilt at I don't even know what. Somehow, I feel guilty even telling you about those negative qualities, here in this essay.

I wonder how her live-in nephew Waldo (Audubon's son, Faber's brother) felt when she finally passed. In a box of family papers I found three handwritten drafts of the obituary Waldo wrote for Mabel, each slightly different from the other. 

 

Figure 30: Three handwritten versions of Mabel Stedman's obituary. Note the first sentence's progression of detail about the exact day when she passed: from "last —" to "last evening" to, finally, "Friday." From the author's family collection.

 

Reading and comparing those drafts, it's clear that while Waldo fiddled a lot with how to phrase the little things—was it a "death" or a "passing"?—he was fairly sure from the beginning about what facts from her life to include—which parts of a life were, we could say, "archivable," worthy to be found by researchers and family—by me. He emphasizes the things that make her stand out: her long life on Brown's Island, the professions of those in her family, her education at Hopedale and Scio colleges, her large correspondence, her memberships, her connections.

And maybe that's appropriate, I don't know. But the thing I most wish I knew about the death of that eighty-five-year-old woman—who, by the way, remembered to bequeath $75 in her will for a bronze gravestone to match the others, and who I suspect purposefully put herself at the intersection of an invisible line between the graves of Chet and Faber, her favorite brother and favorite nephew, which also happened to be to the north of her mother Emily in the spot she knew her father had craved—what I wish I knew was what it felt like to live out her days so close to, but not actually on, Brown's Island. It's not the kind of thing you put in an obituary, I know, but think about it: her final twenty-nine years were just a block from the Ohio River, less than 2 miles upstream from the tip of the island where she had lived her whole life, where she had actually been born.

Surely there were mornings when Waldo couldn't find Aunt Bell and wandered outside, only to see her kneeling precariously at the edge of the bank, throwing sticks and flower blossoms into the water, knowing it wouldn't be long before they passed the island's bank, where a past-her would have scooped them out of the water and carried them to her family, both parents and the other four siblings all together, alive, playing and working as a team, time nothing but a river that flows in all directions until it doesn't. Surely somewhere beneath the slag there's still a memory of her family on that land, alongside all those other families who lived and died there.

And surely there's no way a reader of those family archives can even begin to understand those lived experiences, no matter how much we read, how deep we dig.

Figure 31: Rivers just keep going, following what went before but also slowly carving new channels. GIF made by the author from Southern California Edison Company (1922). 

 

 

References