Chapter II - Taming the Tiger
2009, Dublin
One day, out of the blue, a lucrative business contract got cancelled. Not long after, one of Jed’s major materials suppliers could not guarantee a delivery date. Then, new projects in the pipeline were shelved. More and more Irish businesses hid behind the lame excuse of “cash flow problems” when challenged. The grossly over-inflated island property bubble had gone “POP!” In hindsight, every company or building developer, large or small, had been handed wads of cash by lending institutions on the strength of real estate valuations that had more than doubled in a decade. Slowly, but surely, some banks realized that there were no more buyers for the costly new-builds. Every Irishman or woman now had a home. Some had two or three. As a result, clutches of new high-rise apartments and vast housing estates across rural Ireland would lie vacant for years. Dormant ghost villages were left to rot. The bankers could not get their loans back and defaulting accounts were closed down. With financial investment halted, the Irish economy crashed to crisis point in a matter of months.
Jed took the blows hard, on a personal level. Whilst he had not really borrowed much money for himself or his employer, the crack in the building supply and demand chain brought his Irish business to its knees, fast. Many clients were broke, and vital suppliers were in debt too. Jed was tormented by having to let go of new recruits and new young friends in order to balance the account books. Jed knew that the PC business-speak phrase of “let go” could mean the destruction of a young family’s life in real terms.
His parent company stripped vital assets by transporting huge engineering equipment to the still prosperous Far East. Jed could not fight this inevitability. The Irish game was up. No new contracts meant no need for idle resources. Jed teetered on the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown through exhaustion, just like the one Sue had nursed him out of years back when he had started working eighteen hours a day to turn around a prestigious project set up wrongly by an idiotic boss.
Throughout all the years of Tiger-fuelled excess, Jed kept a level head by finally being in the right place to research his ancestry, something he had wanted to do for years. His ancestors came from the other side of the country to Dublin, but he was only three hour’s drive away from Ireland’s wild west on the newly built motorway network. Even more conveniently, Jed had weekly meetings with the big Irish clients in the heart of Dublin City, and he often found a spare hour to pop into the libraries and repositories that hold Ireland’s historical civil and parish records. Jed was clever enough to electronically scan many registers that he did not have time to read in full, and then on weekends (between parties) he created computer software programs that would automatically search for keywords of interest among hundreds of pages of irrelevant and unwanted text. In so doing, Jed was conducting ancestry research at a vastly higher speed than the conventional family historian who sat squinting at dusty library books day after day.
Jed’s weekend hobby became a passion. The task of piecing together a complex array of jigsaw-like clues to create a snapshot image of a long-deceased relative took Jed’s mind completely off any weekday business concerns. He considered that the biggest thrill was being the first person to discover the existence of a new individual in the family tree—someone whom everyone had overlooked and long-forgotten about— but still a man or woman who used to live and breathe, and influence other lives. Jed told Sue that the moment of discovery was not quite as good as sex, but it came close. The senior associates at the Dublin Genealogical Society never quite understood this simile when it was instinctively declared during a debate at his one and only meeting appearance, so Jed vowed never to darken the doors of Irish academia again. He was convinced to research his family history his way from now on, and not in the sneeringly detached “conformist” way promoted by some academics. Jed had feelings and emotions about his research subjects, and he was proud of this fact.
On a Monday morning at work, when the phone call came and Jed was asked to fly to Paris to discuss “the Irish situation” alongside the main Board of Directors, he was not surprised. He knew that something major had to change. All the profits of five years hard labor were in danger of being lost in less than twelve months of stagnation and cutbacks. Jed clung to his Irish dream because he and Sue had never been happier, and every alternative filled him with dread.
The cold discussion in the new managing director’s top floor Paris office suite did surprise Jed. In fact, it shocked him almost speechless. The board meeting, conducted in French, went badly wrong when Irish operations came up. Jed’s over-optimistic budget for the coming year was thrown out as “unworkable.” Jed then sarcastically muttered (in English) that the shareholders had “milked Irish clients dry, but now the Irish clients were redundant.” The French top dog asked Jed to step into his private office whilst others took a comfort break. His boss spoke the following words slowly and menacingly in his odd French accent: “You say redundant. You want redundant. You get redundant.”
Jed tried to comprehend the poor grammar by asking for a polite explanation. He spoke in French to his new boss, vainly hoping for some kind of reprieve. The CEO calmly reiterated in better English, “You mention redundant. You are now redundant. So you can go,” and with that, the CEO marched out of the room to gather up his fellow board directors and resume his all-important global domination discussions. With a dry throat, Jed asked the managing director’s secretary to immediately get him a taxi to Charles De Gaulle airport.
In the airport departure hall, Jed felt faint when he phoned Sue on his mobile to tell her the shocking news. Then he fought hard to stay dry-eyed as Sue broke down in sobs on the other end of the line. The Irish dream was truly over: no more helicopter rides for Sunday lunch on the coast in Wexford, no more VIP invites to glamorous parties, no more executive boxes on company accounts for big sports events. Jed told Sue not to worry, but also promised that he would not be forced into flying half-way around the world to start another engineering business venture in God knows where. He managed to raise a tearful giggle when he told Sue that he was on his way home to Ireland a day early “so everything’s not bad news.”
On the lonely flight home, drinking the most expensive French red wine that he could charge to his business Amex card, the pieces of Jed’s recession-busting plan fell into place, bit by bit. It would be a harder sell to Sue this time though.
Whilst visiting his family and Wild West of Ireland friends on weekends, Jed and Sue had invested some of their savings into buying a plot of land with great potential for building a country home. It started off as a sort of investment plan—build quick and sell for a profit. Jed was not totally comfortable with having become a speculative property developer in his ancestral heartland, but prudent pension planning took precedence. Slow building progress dictated that the Sligo Project evolved into a holiday cottage design: somewhere for Jed and Sue to stay when fleeing the big city. However, the excesses of their Dublin home influenced things—Jed and Sue enlarged and added rooms. Jed acted as overall project manager, a role he knew well, and he employed many grateful local tradesmen to build his weekend retreat. It became a mini-replica of the rented palace in Dublin that would now have to be handed back to a penniless landlord, or probably the landlord‘s bank. The Sligo Project got finished just in time for the bursting of the Irish property price bubble.
So Jed could not sell his Sligo holiday villa. As such, it was patently obvious to him that Sligo would become his next permanent home if he was not to be lured again by the temptation of mega-dollars in civilized Alberta or Singapore, or even in the sandy wilds of Timbuktu. The next crucial question was what could he do in the middle of a sleepy, rural west of Ireland community, post-2008, to earn a moderate, if not decent income? The neighboring Sligo fraternity advised Jed that locals have two choices—buy a farm and pray, or emigrate. Both options had been witnessed as reality in modern-day Ireland during bleary-eyed weekend drinking “celebrations” in the village pub. Many locals celebrated survival; others celebrated leaving.
Jed had a different idea—Ancestry. He had met many heritage tourists during his years back in Ireland. These folks, primarily from America and Australia, wanted to know where their mysterious Irish relatives came from. They were desperate for an inkling of how and why their ancestors left such a beautiful country, never to return. Jed had the answers. His own grandfather and great uncles and aunts had made the same treks overseas to foreign lands. Such was the clamor for ancestral information that successful TV shows had sprung up featuring the same tales of migration—tales of extreme poverty and stories of overcoming the most horrendous family circumstances, then making it (comparatively) big in far-flung regions. This subject inspired Jed, and it inspired him in the first-class compartment of an Air France shuttle from Paris to Dublin.
Later that evening: “Sue, you’re a genius with the computer stuff. I can gather the data and we’ll make a living in no time at all. It won’t be Grafton Street and designer dresses, but we won’t have to answer to the heartless suits. It’ll be our business—work the hours we feel like. Take walks up the mountain, or down to the lake. Get by, but with enough to eat out and chill out now and again. You look sexy in wellies in my opinion.” This was a jibe too far, and Sue could only rock in Jed’s cradling arms saying, “I dunno, I really don‘t know.”
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2011, Sligo
Out loud, Jed is reminiscing to Sue about a few of the ancestors he has uncovered in Tim‘s paternal ancestry. Tim’s German and Irish ancestral roots had been fully verified on his father‘s side. “Remember how Tim was so shocked when we told him that his father had been married twice? But he was so understanding and grateful to know, especially when we explained that his dad’s first wife had died tragically after just nine months of marriage. Imagine his dad’s heartbreak. Tim’s such a lovely man. I like him.”
“Yeah, I do too,” says Sue. “For reasons we don’t understand, he seems to have been kept totally in the dark about his parents’ backgrounds. Hopefully we can help him out some more.”
Jed wipes the whiteboard clean. The board was just one piece of Jed’s impressive office equipment. He had transferred the complete contents of his high-tech former Dublin office across to Sligo, and re-assembled everything into what had been originally designed as a large downstairs guest bedroom in his country retreat. This array of modern technology and top of the range office furniture had not cost Jed a cent. As a parting shot, Jed had negotiated a phenomenal severance package when he stunned his former employers with an unfair dismissal claim that could not fail. He was able to cash in all those untaken holidays and excessive working hours, meticulously recorded in his diary. The French-owned construction behemoth did not want bad press for “abusing” one of its star performers for over a decade. The twitchy French HR director wilted under threat of legal proceedings. Over the years, many senior managers have been told to “clear their desks” after business re-structuring. In Jed’s case, he literally cleared his desk all the way to Sligo, along with a significant purse of tax-free Euros.
It was time to ring Tim and discuss Phase Two, as agreed. In brief, Phase Two was to be the research into the even lesser-known maternal ancestry of Tim. About three months back, Tim had tantalizingly warned that there were more questions to be answered on his mother’s side than his father’s. In truth, all Tim’s primary research objectives had concerned his mother and her immediate ancestors—but he had wisely tested out Jed’s research prowess by getting him to complete the paternal family tree before commissioning the optional Phase Two. Tim had been a shrewd and successful businessman before early semi-retirement, and he still was.
During “getting to know each other” phone chats, Tim had opened up and revealed that his mother had suffered with a deep sense of loss, perhaps true clinical depression, as her years advanced. In addition to causing his mother to suffer, this melancholy affected those who loved her, including of course Tim and his own family. Tim now needed to understand what had caused this family trauma. It was something to do with her past—but what? That was the question, and Jed’s next challenge.
Late Spring, 2011
After exchanging pleasantries, Tim, based in California, offers yet more compliments to Jed over the phone about the research work methodically undertaken so far on his behalf. Tim then starts to tell Jed the little he had found out about his mother Laura Harrison’s early life. Jed is told that Laura’s mother was called “Madeline Forster” and apparently died of cancer when Laura was age three. That’s what Laura told Tim when he asked questions, anyway. Her father left home shortly after, and Laura hated her father for this. “She wouldn’t even speak about him, except to say ‘my father left me,’ and that‘s that.”
Tim continues his family history summary. Laura had one older sister, Alice, and they said that they were raised by various foster parents. Alice married Samuel Smith, and Uncle Samuel was the last of Tim's mother’s generation to pass away just a few years back. Alice and Samuel had one son, John. Just before he died, Samuel told Tim something peculiar. He said that he knew Laura and Alice’s father briefly, and he did walk out on the family, but not immediately after his wife Madeline‘s death. After that, Alice and Laura’s father couldn’t be traced, although he used to send money to the girls in envelopes with no return address. Samuel recalled some money arriving by post one Christmas. He thought the post mark indicated a place in Montana, or was it Wyoming? Samuel’s memory was fuzzy in old age. The Harrison girls lived in Mason City, Iowa, at the time. Samuel said that he knew the name of his wife’s father, but he had promised Alice and Laura never to talk of him to their offspring, John and Tim. Samuel kept his promise regarding the name, and died shortly after.
“As you know, Jed, my father died when I was sixteen, so I never even got the chance to ask him what he knew about my mother’s family,” said Tim, sounding a little emotional. “But I’ve just gotten a new lead for you, regarding my mother’s father.”
Tim explains that he had been in contact with his cousin John a few days ago. John said he thought he once saw his mysterious grandfather’s name on a document in Alice’s old trunk, which he now possessed. In contrast, Jed is aware that Tim has no family mementoes at all. Laura destroyed everything in a fit of rage on one dark day, forcing Tim to institutionalize his troubled mother for the last few years of her life. The call ends with Tim promising to get this elusive document from John, and to e-mail a copy to Jed.
“Okay, bye, Tim. And don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of all this. I really hope I can give you some peace of mind. Bye.” With the call disconnected, Jed turns to Sue, “This is going to be the toughest yet, but we’ve got to help poor Tim. He’s in torment.”
Jed quickly summarizes all the names and places he jotted down during the phone call with Tim. He then re-boots his array of computer screens. Not long after, high-speed databases search for the names Laura or Alice Harrison from Mason City, producing a hit of highest probable relevance. A 1920 U.S. Federal Census return reveals two young Harrison sisters listed as ”Alice” and “Laurie” living with their parents in Iowa. The mother is “Maddie.” It’s a virtual match ... and for the first time, the name of Laura’s father is revealed, in part at least: “M. E. Harrison,” reportedly born in Illinois in the late 1880’s. Jed draws a basic family tree chart on the whiteboard, and inserts the names and birth years of the 1920 Harrison family. Jed puts a ring round the box showing the name M. E. Harrison.
“This mystery guy is going to be fun to research, Sue, but it’s getting late now.”
Jed and his loving sidekick will get stuck in, and sucked in, tomorrow.
1920, Mason City
A smartly dressed young father plays with his two daughters in the neat garden of his city home. It’s our first glimpse of Merrill as an adult. It’s a nice family scene. Everybody is relaxed and having fun. Merrill takes turns at pushing the giggling girls on twin rope swings. We cannot see mother Madeline, but we know she’s within earshot indoors, as she shouts, “Don’t push Laura too high, Merrill. You’re scaring her.”
The house rear door and windows are fully open as Madeline prepares dinner in the kitchen. The heat in the city is still almost oppressive, even in the late afternoon sunshine.
“Oh, I’ll never harm my baby girl, will I?” and as Merrill finishes his sentence, Laura leaps from the slowing swing seat into her daddy’s arms. Merrill then gathers up Alice as well and throws both laughing girls over his shoulders as he playfully carries them along the garden path towards the kitchen table.
2011, Sligo
In Jed’s home office research HQ, steaming cups of coffee sit on the desks, and Jed’s cigarette smoke rises in the air. Sue leans on Jed’s shoulder peering at his main computer screen. She points out that Laura is three years old in the 1920 census taken on the first night of January, so her mother Madeline must have definitely died during 1920. “That’s what Tim told you, isn’t it?“
Sue offers to trawl the Iowa death registers on her own PC across the room. Jed pats Sue‘s backside as she moves away, adding, “Okay, I’ll see if I can find the Harrison family on the next census dates in 1925 and 1930.” Within minutes, Jed has found the Harrisons in 1925, and reads out what his screen is showing him: “M. E. Harrison, living with Alice and Laura, and Madeline has gone as expected – but hang on, M. E. says he is married, not widowed.”
Jed exhales his cigarette smoke and takes a slurp of strong coffee, then resumes his workplace deliberations. “Mmm? So-o-o, as Tim’s Uncle Samuel advised, M. E. did look after the girls for a while.”
Sue is puzzled: “M. E. must be a widower, really. That census isn’t quite right.” But she can’t find a death record for Madeline in 1920, or 1921 and 1922, for that matter. Sue keeps searching, as Jed eventually finds a copy of the 1930 census for Alice and Laura which turns out to be somewhat faded. His search engines had labored to track down his array of keywords. “BINGO! Listen to this Sue – M. E.’s still got the girls, but his marital status now says ‘divorced‘.”
Jed thinks he knows what’s happened: “M.E. and Madeline must have split up during the mid-1920’s, and they were divorced by 1930. Simple. Madeline never did die when Laura was three years old. Tim’s mother just couldn’t remember much about why her own mother left. She was probably told as a kid that her mom was dead.”
Sue winces, “Well, I’ve been wasting my time. Thanks, Laura!”
Jed tells Sue that in the 1930 Census this M. E. fellow now reckons he was born in Iowa, not Illinois. “Very odd.” he quips. “Make your mind up, man.”
2011, California
Later that same day, Tim receives Alice’s birth certificate from his cousin John: “Born November 13, 1913, in Mason City, parents Merrill Harrison and Madeline Forster.” He relays the info to Jed via e-mail. The phone rings in seconds. Jed is on the line. “Congratulations, Tim! You beat me to it. We now have the name of your mystery grandfather. I got as far as the initial “M,” but I couldn’t find any document where he used his full forename. So, Merrill is the man who eventually goes missing.”
“Have you got anything else on this guy yet, Jed?“
Jed goes on to tell Tim that he already knows quite a bit more about his grandfather. Merrill was a successful businessman, the president of a printing company, no less. He owned his own home, in an era when many poorer folks were forced to rent. And Merrill’s parents came from Pennsylvania. “The 1925 Iowa census even tells us their names, Tim , so we‘re up and running. It’s not all plain sailing, though. I’ve no idea what his middle initial ‘E’ stands for and Merrill’s birthplace is clouded in confusion. Merrill mentions Illinois, and then Iowa, and sometimes Pennsylvania.”
Tim is in a buoyant and jovial mood. “Well, that’s why I employ experts, Jed. You’ll find him. I’m confident of that. Nothing’s straightforward in my family, is it? And you wouldn’t want an easy ride.”
Then Jed breaks the other news gently; he tells Tim that his grandparents got divorced. However, Tim is not too concerned, retorting that this perhaps makes sense. He advises that, on her deathbed, Laura had been semi-conscious on painkillers. She occasionally rambled on about her father being a “no-good drunk who fought with everybody.”
Late 1920’s, Iowa
Merrill and a bunch of guys in business suits are getting drunk in a sleazy bar. Some are jacketless, and one loosens his tie and unfastens the collar of his tailored white shirt. The men talk loudly about the ball game they’ve just watched. Merrill is taunted about the silly bet he lost. “Ah, it’s only money .... and I’ll get it back next week. Just you watch.”
“Oh yeah? And the Hawkeyes will win the Big Ten this year too, eh?” howls one of Merrill’s cronies from across the bar. Everyone bursts into raucous laughter. Merrill is known to have placed a series of bets that are bound to fail because the local Iowa City team keeps letting him down.
Young girls are chatted-up, more and more illicit booze is consumed, and dollar bills are surreptitiously gathered up by a nervous barman. This is the Prohibition Era, but successful big-shots can buy anything, including silence. The loud conversations turn to business matters. Merrill joins in the boasts about “making a killing” here, there and everywhere, to impress the girls. Not long later, the middle-aged man seated to Merrill’s left whispers something into his female escort’s ear. The couple withdraws into a side room, kissing and giggling as they go. Merrill knows that money really can buy a lot of good things in the Midwest.