Flag Day, 1977. It was a strange day in a strange year for me. A few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, my last grandparent died.

Being seventeen was a challenge. My parents were getting a divorce. Life around home was rough. By the end or my junior year of high school, I had already racked up enough credits to graduate, so I skipped my senior year and went off to college early. The way my high school handled it, I needed to complete my freshman year of college and then return to graduate with the people who had been my classmates for so many years.

My younger sister hated me for leaving. It was pretty rough on her as well. I told her that if you are sitting on a block of ice and managing to melt the ice, then maybe it is worth it to stick around, but if all your doing is freezing your ass off, then it is probably time to leave. I felt I was freezing my ass off, and not really doing anyone any good.

During my freshman year at college, I received a letter from my mother. A girl that I had been interested in, in my unsophisticated geeky sort of way had disappeared. This was in the days before instant communications of email, and our family had always only used the telephone for emergencies. It never occurred to my mother that this might be an emergency to me. I had kept my romantic interests to myself and I don’t think my mother knew how attached I was to the missing girl, or what such a disappearance would do to the addled brain of a bright, messed up teenager.

A month later, I received another letter from my mother. They had found Rocky’s body in a ravine a few towns away from where I had grown up. My mother included newspaper clippings of the funeral. College was a ten hour drive away, so there was no way that I could have made it to the funeral anyway, but I was hurt that I didn’t get a chance to say my final goodbyes with my classmates.

Then, at the end of the school year, I did receive a phone call from my mother. Her father, who had been fighting Parkinson’s disease for many years finally died at the end of May. The school year was over, so I scrounged around to find a ride to his funeral. I think it was first time being a pallbearer.

Somewhere during this time period, I attended my high school graduation, which was a very awkward affair. I had been gone for all of my senior year. I didn’t really know all my classmates that well any more, and I had begun the changes that college brings.

So, Flag Day, 1977. My mother was at my aunt’s house. She was helping them deal with the aftermath of my grandfather’s death and care for my grandmother who had been quite ill for a long time as well.

The phone rang. I don’t remember exactly who answered the phone, I think it was me, or who said it, I think it was my eldest brother, but we were all there and we all knew what the phone call was. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a family that only used the phone for emergencies. We knew my grandmother was very sick, so someone said, “Grandma died”, before the phone was answered.

Sure enough, it was my grief stricken mother, letting us know that Grammy had died. On top of all the other losses in my mother’s life, she was now an orphan. She hadn’t been able to talk over her problems with her parents much during their final years, but now, it was final and she wouldn’t be able to go them for comfort ever again, the way she had when she was younger.

My father’s parents died before I was born, and being next to the youngest child of the youngest child of my grandparents, being from a family that didn’t travel much and rarely got together with my grandparents, this loss of connection with a previous generation was much more detached than what it was like for my wife when the last of her grandparents died. Kim’s grandparents lived in the next town over, and she regularly went to their house to swim, to eat, or just to hang out with her extended family.

And so it is Flag Day 2008. For some reason, my grandmother came to mind last night. Over the years, I’ve been interested in genealogy and have built up a good database about my ancestors, including the dates of their births, deaths, and marriages. Being the fact checking blogger that I am, I wanted to check the details, make sure that I remembered things right. Yes, the database confirmed that Grammy died on June 14, 1977.

My ancestors were early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This means that there is a lot of genealogical data about them, and many of them have been traced back to their first arrival in America in the early 1600s. My grandmother was of the Eastman line, a line traced back nicely to Roger Eastman, and early settler about how much work has been done. He arrived in America on “Confidence” in 1638. Roger is my 8th Great Grandfather. His grandson, Captain Ebenezer Eastman married Sarah Peaslee. Sarah’s brother John married Mary Martin. Mary Martin was the granddaughter of Susannah (North) Martin, who was executed in Salem Massachusetts in 1692 on the charge of witchcraft. Somewhere else in the Eastman family tree is Daniel Webster.

Sarah Peaslee’s mother was Ruth Barnard whose great grandfather was Thomas Barnard. Thomas was one of the original purchasers of Nantucket in 1659, although apparently Thomas never visited the island.

So, I have spent the hours before Flag Day 2008 learning a little more about my family history, and through it the history of our country. There are witches and islands in our family tree, and many other great stories as well, yet most importantly, all the stories from today, from thirty-one years ago and from three hundred and fifty years ago make up the fabric of our lives, a rich tapestry with various rips and stains.