In the summer of 1973, about six weeks after I had graduated from high school, one of my friends from elementary school, Danny Lopez, was shot dead on the main street of my hometown in the San Joaquin Valley.
It was a “stray bullet” scenario. The shooter was a member of a gang from a neighboring town. He was a passenger in a carload of his peers “cruising” down our main street in a show of macho spirit. On the spur of the moment, the perp decided to fire off a few potshots. He wasn’t specifically targetting Danny. He was “shooting at storefronts” almost as if creating graffiti, tagging with bullet holes rather than spray paint.
The problem was, one of the bullets hit Danny in the neck. His jugular vein was ruptured. Not much the paramedics could do.
For Danny, it was obviously an incident that defined his destiny. Yet he had taken no action that he could have imagined would put him at risk. He was on that sidewalk by happenstance. He wasn’t a “rival gang member.” The spot was not a hangout for local gang members. It was a random stretch of my town’s retail heart, a safe and unremarkable spot — unremarkable except of course that it transformed into a crime scene. I had probably traipsed across that very square of concrete half a dozen times during the previous few weeks. It was only a couple of doors down from the newsstand where I bought comic books and paperbacks, and it was right across from the barbershop where my barber, Angel Huerta, was in the early phase of his well over half-a-century career of cutting hair. For Danny, the development boiled down to that bitter cliché: wrong place, wrong time.
As a genealogist, I often think of destinies, and of the occasions when those destinies have little to do with the deliberate choices made by those involved. However, in addition to contemplating the fates of individuals, I am drawn to the way things worked out for entire family lines.
If you’ve read any of my genealogically-inspired blog entries, you may already know that a favorite focus of my research is my great-great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin (1816-1905) and Hannah Strader (1829-1919). Unquestionably, if one evaluates their destiny, it could fairly be summed up as, “They thrived.” Not that fate treated them lightly in every instance — on the negative side, nine of their fourteen children predeceased Nathaniel, and by the time Hannah passed away, the tally had risen to eleven. Nonetheless, on the whole, they did well and now sit in the archive as the patriarch and matriarch of a clan of nearly one thousand descendants.
A similar assessment could be made for a couple of Nathaniel’s nine siblings and half a dozen of Hannah’s nine siblings. But not all. Why that is the case is not always explicable. I’ll flesh out two examples.
Nathaniel “came west” as a young man in the company of a brother, Isaiah Martin (came west means they departed the family home in Monroe County, WV in 1836 in favor of St. Louis, MO). The brothers were often partners in employment situations, got married to their spouses at essentially the same point in life, and both settled down at first within the same tiny community along the Pecatonica River at the boundary of Wisconsin and Illinois. But in the long run, the tale of Isaiah’s clan is vastly different than the tale of Nathaniel’s. To boil it down, only two descendants were added to Isaiah’s clan during the Twentieth Century — his lone great-grandchild, and that man’s only child, my fourth cousin Dorothy of Dallas, TX, who is in her mid-seventies and who is childless (despite having married before the age of thirty). Once Dorothy passes away, Isaiah’s line will be extinct.
Hannah’s sister Susan Anna Strader’s family story amounts to a similar outcome. Susan and her husband, Peter Hughes, despite a slightly late start to their union, did well enough at first. Six kids. Surely, one would think, six kids would inevitably lead to a big passel of 21st Century surviving descendants who could repeat the tale of Peter’s brief foray to California during the Gold Rush (Isaiah Martin was another who did this, as it happens), and the tale of Susan and Peter and their little ones participating in a seven-month wagon train trek from Wisconsin to settle in the Mother Lode in 1853. But Susan and Peter had no grandchildren. When their daughter Rachel died in 1923, the line was extinguished.
What could Isaiah have done that could have led to his clan’s impending last glimmer? What did Susan do that no grandchildren would ever put flowers on her grave? Nothing, as far as I can tell. As with Danny Lopez, bad shit happened. Things just, as they say, worked out that way.
What to do about it? In the real world, not much. All that any of us really do — keep in mind that I’m an atheist — is to recognize the randomness of the universe, and carry on as best we can.
It’s with fiction I can do more than that. In fiction, outcomes occur because of the choices actively made by characters, and the writer, if they’re doing their job right, portrays what the likely — and I dare say, appropriate — consequences of those choices. Bad things happen to those who deserve it. Good things happen to those who earn it. Some days, I close the family-tree file early, even when I could do a bit more research, fill in a few names and dates. Instead I open up my word processor and do some fiction writing. I have to do so. I need to spend my energies in worlds that have meaning.
