Who am I?

Is there any more basic question one can ask of oneself than that?

Who are my ancestors?

Where did they come from?

What was their genetic makeup?

The subject matter is so popular that PBS has a show hosted by the marvelous Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. entitled Finding Your Roots underwritten in part, naturally, by Ancestry.com.  I DVR it every week and for the longest time I had wanted to be able to fully answer that simple question myself.

Dr. Gates’ guests of African-American descent often run into a brick wall when attempting to plot their family origins. They get as far as where their ancestors arrived and perhaps on what ship and that is the end of the trail.

For my family one branch on our tree had never been fully ascertainable.  Thanks to some fine detective work by my cousin June, the Meadows side of our lineage was traced all the way back to its roots in England and eventually to Charlemagne.  Likewise, the prodigious Lilly clan on my Grandma Meadows’ side.  My maternal Grandma Dasher or “Nana” as we called her was a Curnane of County Cork and her mother had kissed the Blarney Stone, so three guesses where they came from.

But the Dasher lineage represented a genealogical black hole.  Roy J. Dasher or “Bampa” as he was known to all of us (because my older sister couldn’t pronounce Grandpa as a toddler) was a total mystery.  While his surname was Irish, one look at him told you that he most assuredly was not a son of the Emerald Isle.  Dark skinned with high cheekbones, Bamp was ‘something’ … but what?  We were told that he had been an orphan and family legend had it that Bampa might be Native American in origin, perhaps from the nearby Seneca tribe in upstate New York.  Any discussion of his ancestry dead-ended there.

In later life Bamp was a wiry, little, bantam rooster kinda guy with a ready smile and a killer turkey gravy recipe that he took pleasure in preparing for us every Thanksgiving.  He unfortunately carried it with him to the grave.  We knew that Bamp had fought in WWI and he had tattoos on his arms which were evident when he rolled up his shirtsleeves to cook the turkey dinner every year.  He had worked for JFK’s father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy as a driver and the fact that Nana and Bamp got a Christmas card every year from then-Senator and later President John F. Kennedy lent credence to that story.  When he died, Nana was convinced that Bamp’s ‘political friends’ had paid for his funeral.  

They had not; My Dad did.

My Mom recalled that when she was little and wearing her Sunday finest, Bamp insisted on putting a napkin on the windowsill before she sat down, lest she get her pretty dress dirty.  During WWII, Bamp served as an Air Raid Marshall and he went into a building to investigate why the lights were still on in a certain apartment during a blackout drill.  It turned out to be my Dad, who was then attending Harvard Medical School, studying. Bamp famously banished Dad from their apartment and told him to “Never darken our doorstep again” because Dad was not Catholic.  Somehow my Dad was able to overcome those obstacles and he and “the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen” were married in 1944. Bamp died at Mass General Hospital 20 years later, after succumbing to what my sister the nurse refers to as a “Triple A” – an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm.

Nana and Bampa were quite the odd couple.  The dark skinned, feisty little dude of questionable origin and the Irish woman who was stricken with polio in her youth and had to wear an elevated boot to compensate.  

My Mom once showed me a picture of Bamp in his WWI army uniform and shared the wiseass-Boston-Irish-Grandma nickname that Nana had for him.

She called him “The Little General.”

***

With the advent of the internet, genealogy took on an entirely new dimension.  Birth records, marriage licenses, armed forces service records, death certificates, pictures and other documents can now be scanned and posted online.  Best of all – they were searchable!

It was with that in mind that I hit ‘the Googles’ back in 2007 and searched for Roy J. Dasher of Boston.  Couldn’t find anything of consequence on the man in question, but scrolling down the Genealogy.com message board, I came across the following older entry:

Hello,

I found this site using a search engine.

My name is Roy Joseph Dasher. I live in Baltimore, MD. My father was Russell Joseph Dasher. He was from Boston, Mass.

I’m not sure if I am related to anyone here, or not. My father was Irish.

Thanks!

Holy sh*t – it was our cousin, who I had not seen since he was a toddler!  His dad, our Uncle Russ, was more or less estranged from my Mom.  Russ had some mental health issues in his youth and my Dad ended up having to temporarily commit him to an institution.  Russ then joined the Merchant Marines and traveled the world for many years, married after he retired and settled in Baltimore.  He and his wife Blanche came to visit us with ‘Joey’ in the early Sixties.  Russ attended my older sister’s wedding in nearby Annapolis and sat at the same table as me and my brother.  Uncle Russ even sent me a shaving kit as a high school graduation present in 1968.  

After that…nothing!

Consequently, when my Mom died in 1982 we had no way of reaching Russ to let him know that his older sister had passed.

And here was a post from his son, our cousin, looking for the exact same information that we had all been seeking!

Joe’s post had a link on it to his work email address at Handtech.com but when I clicked on it, the link was disabled.  I then Googled “Roy Joseph Dasher of Baltimore” and after several phone calls and much web searching, I was eventually able to track him down.

To a cemetery.

The same one where his mother Blanche was buried.

Joe had died two years earlier in 2005.

Talk about a dead-end!

Fast forward and it seems that Joe and I were not the only ones trying to track down the elusive Roy J. Dasher of Boston.  Our aforementioned cousin June had done likewise and she had actually found his birth record!  She was then contacted by a genealogist by the name of Robert Ankenbauer, who was doing extensive research on the Dasher family, which originally hailed from England.

What they uncovered was the City of Boston birth registry that showed that Royal Joseph Dasher was born in 1892 to Royal H. and Minnie (Donovan) Dasher.

No wonder we couldn’t find anything about Bamp online–his name wasn’t ‘Roy’ it was Royal.

We had been searching for the wrong guy!

To be continued.