Until about eight months ago,the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about my Great Uncle Richard was the way his ashes tasted.
Well, maybe not so much the taste as the texture. Kind of like eating chalk.
I was 9 years old, standing in a little cemetery nestled between fields in a part of rural Ohio where the world flattens out into a table of corn and soybeans stretching to the horizon; the same part of Ohio that much of my family has farmed and called home since they fled revolutionary Germany in the mid-1800s.
I had never met the deceased. I asked why and was told that he lived in Florida. I got the impression, even then, that he had some money and was the source of a framed picture that hung in my living room.
My imagination filled in the rest. I assumed he must be old, since he was my grandma’s brother and she was old. I’d been to a funeral for an old man before — my grandpa. He’d been a brittle figure lying in satin, skin covered in dark spots, hands cold to the touch.
That’s what I was picturing until a man in a suit, whom I wouldn’t meet again for more than 20 years, brought out an urn and started giving a speech.
I must have been a little bit curious about what was in the jar. Almost certainly, I must have been unaware of the prevailing winds. Because when the man opened up the urn and turned out its contents, I got a mouthful of my Great Uncle Richard.
It was just a taste, but it was enough to create something of a connection, a thread that I never really let go of. On that thread I’d hang thoughts of Richard from time to time, even after I stopped fearing I’d be haunted by his ghost. It was the kind of story that you tell over and over and that begs for more stories, that leads to more questions that you can either ask or always wonder about. This spring, by happenstance, I chose to ask, and I set out see if I couldn’t get to know the man my dad and his cousins affectionately called Uncle Dick.
HOW WE GOT THE STORY
Data specialists are a different breed of journalist. They usually have their braniac heads buried all day in multiple screens of code that make the rest of us a bit woozy to look at. They tend to see the world in bar graphs and pie charts and quantifying concepts I can’t even imagine. They provide the facts and numbers on which many of our investigative stories are built. One thing they don’t do very often is a write a story. So when Jeff Ernsthausen suggested he’d like to write a Personal Journey, I was thrilled at the opportunity to work with him, but a little trepidatious. I needn’t have been. Turns out, Ernsthausen isn’t just a number cruncher. He’s a masterful writer and he has a remarkable story to tell about family connections that span generations in unexpected ways.
Suzanne Van Atten
Personal Journeys editor
personaljourneys@ajc.com
ABOUT THE REPORTER
Jeff Ernsthausen is a data specialist on the investigative team at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His past work at the AJC has included quantitative analyses of teacher evaluations, police shootings and voting rights in Georgia, as well as the creation of Predict-A-Bill, the AJC’s statistical forecasting model for legislation before the Georgia General Assembly. A native of Northwest Ohio and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Jeff joined the AJC after a short career as an economic analyst with the Federal Reserve and editorial internships with Harper’s and The Nation.
Jeff Ernsthausen
jeff.ernsthausen@ajc.com
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