The bulging shopping bag of photos was in a corner of my attic office, where it had landed in January of last year. I wanted to look inside and start figuring out what to do with the contents, but I kept having to put it off. Finally today was the day. I took everything out of the bag and sorted the photos and other family memorabilia into piles. The surprise find was a sepia portrait printed on metal in a round gilt frame of gold leaves together with a hand-written note in our Grandmother's distinctive script - small, rapid and neat - on a yellowed scrap of newsprint informing someone - Aunt Elaine? my mother? - that it was their great-grandfather, Henry Johnson Tirrell and that he had married Mary Jane Colby of Manchester, NH.
Three years ago my mother and I had visited the area where the Tirrells lived for generations to the northwest of Manchester, New Hampshire. It was the first time I had ever been to there and I was surprised that Mom knew so much about it and had never taken us up to see where our forebears had settled. When we got to Ware, Mom marched into the library and looked up her relatives in the town records. With that information we headed to Goffstown, where she went right up to a clerk in the townhall and asked for directions to the cemetery, where the Tirrells were buried. The clerk sent us to Grasmere, where we found a cemetery founded in 1844 across from the townhall. We entered the iron gate and started to search for a gravestone with Tirrell. We wandered up and down the rows of Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans' graves marked with flags in cast-iron stands. Halfway across the long, grassy slope, we came upon a massive, granite headstone engraved with block letters: TIRRELL, presiding over a rectangular plot bordered in granite that enclosed the graves of Henry Johnson and Mary Jane Colby Tirrell and their children, who had died in childhood. Nearby there were other Tirrells and Colbys - Henry's parents, his brothers and their wives, perhaps cousins. Today his portrait turned up big, plastic shopping bag. I could see the resemblance to our great-grandmother and our grandfather.
