The End of the Line

William the Farmer (1807 - 1883) 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20"

In 2012, I compiled and wrote End of the Line, a book of genealogy on my patronym (Throop). William of Sutton-cum-Lound, England was the first Throope to arrive in the Massachusetts Colony in 1660. For the book I also painted all of the male generational portraits (real and imagined), and visited all but one of the graves (11 generations).
A fun project that never could have happened without my Great Grandfather’s initial research during the Great Depression. A fine time it was to nurture a hobby!
I felt like an editor mostly, although I did some active research. The following is the editor’s forward:

I remember the first time I got a hold of Throop/Goldsmith Ancestral Charts. My father had me borrow it, as well as Henry’s three unpublished manuscripts (History, Charts, and Photos) when I was 26 years old. I leafed through the pages at my makeshift desk of early sorrows, while dreaming of Henry Miller, Thoreau, Whitman, Kenneth Patchen, etc. I was going to become them, not myself, which, in a fact I could not conceive of at the time, was all I ever was going to be. The study of genealogy is not for the modern twenty-something. It is a very rare wonder, a young man or woman today delving into the world of their ancestors. Yet for Henry Throop it was an interest of his at an early age. Was genealogy a popular pastime at the turn of the 20th century? His book of local deaths, begun at age eleven, was most likely a professional duty left by a recently deceased country doctor to his son, and not a boy’s macabre fascination to be diagnosed by the Freudians of his day. Still Henry’s interest in the families of Lebanon, N.Y., even in his time, was probably a peculiar quirk for a young man soon off to academy and then college. His early journals are replete with accounts of local marriages, births and deaths. In hindsight this sheds light to a different career path that would have brought him uncommon joys. A successful engineer, I have no doubt that Henry was a born historian. Maybe he would have tossed into the ditch Macadam Road worries and transit dreams, provided there existed an economy in his day that encouraged the intellectual flights of fancy of poor country boys.

So I returned the books to my Dad, giving back no more than “Hmphh, imagine that!” out of the exchange, and continued on my own path of raising a daughter half-time as a line cook in a rinky-dink restaurant. I had dreams too. The literary life! A path of writing out my history as it happened; in the modern fashion a la´Henry Miller — the good, the bad, the private and often truly embarrassing. Unlike my great grandfather, I actually lived in an economy where I could choose any path I wanted, provided I paid my dues to the university that would graduate me to the career and/or income level of my choice. And yet unlike Henry I was raised in a community that worshipped its own immediate marvelousness and seemed to cut all ties to its past. It’s funny how Henry mentions with amusement in his autobiography that his children Ronald and Robert thought he lived in “Bible” times. And yet I think of my grandfather Ronald as the most conservative, traditional human being that ever walked the earth.
I am told by my father David that Ronald took little interest in Henry’s passion for the past. Yet I know now that by succumbing to the power of tradition, Ronald proved to be quite gifted in the art of the future. He and my grandmother Evelyn, funded the undergraduate educations of all five of their grandchildren. Both attended Cornell during the Depression years, and forged a will towards lifelong frugality. My living family owes a deep debt of gratitude to their gift, for although their hope was to secure a bright economic future for their progeny, they could not foresee the immense social and economic change that would spoil the be-Jesus out of successive generations. Still they deserve high praise for their efforts, for I believe that even if a college degree does not guarantee two cars and a garage, it can pull the individual somewhat out of ignorance in a world gone wrong. Eventually true education will pine for knowledge of the past, wherein lies the wisdom that those who cannot learn (the ignorant) or will not (the arrogant, formerly educated fools), are denied. I cannot speak for my sisters and cousins, but I have been a carrier of the torch set by our ancestors. And I will (I already have) handed it over to my daughters. Henry funded Ronald’s education. The DeClerq’s did the same for Evelyn (college was a tool for her to find a rich husband, yet she chose Ronald, to her parent’s chagrin). William and Calphurnia set up James Mott for a medical degree. Dan and Sarah Throop helped their son William become a schoolhouse teacher. No government loans. No scholarship opportunities listed on the internet. The next generation was to have a better life, but not without hard work and responsibility. Oh yes, and up to the discovery of penicillin, most held a deep respect for a god that would take their loved ones on an insidious whim. This kept everyone’s life on a less selfish, more communal trajectory. The boom economy of the mid twentieth century had the fathers working, the mothers starting to dream about work, and a new age where even their daughters could go to college to begin a career, and choose a husband who supported a wife's ambitions beyond housework and the raising of children. Wow! Progress! The kids were left home to play all day, without fieldwork and disease. Praise the home inventions and affordable access to video and vroom-vroom. Forget about those old codgers of the past. Let’s party!
Well, we have lost so much in less than a century. Although I have not honored my grandparents with a choice career, at least I have gained the knowledge of whom to emulate for the next thirty summers or so.
My people.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that there are more than enough world champions to fit into every category of human endeavor. The rest of us are poor imitators to the “great ones” of today. And we suffer a lifetime of familial lonliness for giving up the evolutionary success of clans nurtured for thousands upon thousands of years.
A western genealogy going back several generations will pinpoint the dislocation for individual families. Modern technology has freed us to take a path back to a wisdom which was forgotten soon after so much of the world got rich so quickly. After discovering the contents of Throops past in stored boxes I now possess the desire to shun all imitation of fools. This private education got its jumpstart in the public institution. For this I am grateful. It is okay to be who I am. I am so much my father and mother and the sum of all family that came before. The future is my children. The past are my ancestors. Thoreau wrote that it’s “better to be a living dog than a dead lion.” I disagree. The dead lions live in us all, and because of this knowledge, I rise above “dog”, not by virtue of my own life necessarily, but as a result of the efforts of my forbears. They are me. I am a wonder of evolution, and my daughters will be even more suited to maneuver through life’s future challenges. It is to Henry, for his reverence of the past, and to Ronald, for his steadfast hope in the future, that I dedicate this book.

This is not a complete genealogy. Not even close. It is to be shown in an art installation this Fall which centers around portraits painted of the direct paternal line of Throops going back to William of Barnstable Massachusetts, 1660. I know I have a mother and great mothers descending a million or so years back to equatorial Africa, and each of these human wonders had a father and mother. To think about the multitudinous lines connected in memory to just one person living today, is more the task for a math super genius than the hobbyist historian.
No, my method is for sake of congruity. I assemble the following pages with a loving touch to carry on a small portion of the work begun by my great grandfather.
So no hard feelings mothers and daughters!

Ronald the Soldier (1912 - 1976) 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20"