It’s a Small, Small World

It’s a Small, Small World

(Thanks to the Internet)

In 2002, my childhood classmate from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and I tracked down half a dozen other classmates.  Friends I hadn’t seen in 29 years.  We all started chatting via email and decided to see how many more former classmates we could find.  And slowly our numbers grew.
 

As we began to share photos amongst us, I offered to build a web site where we could post them all in one place where they could be accessed by all.

Interest grew and we tracked down yet others.  And then we began talking about getting together someday.  And the seeds of a reunion were planted.

Sometime in 2005 or 2006, a man named Kenneth Mossberg and his wife Eleanor Schweitz left their home in Sweden to go to Denmark.  I am guessing it was for a family gathering, or possibly a family funeral.

While at the relative’s house, they got to going through old photographs, and one in particular caught Kenneth’s eye: a photo of a man probably taken in the 1920s by the look of his clothing.

It was a great photo, not necessarily for its quality or even its composition, so much as its mysterious quality.

Along a nondescript dirt road in the countryside somewhere, a man squats with a dog and three puppies.  By the looks of the man, he is an animal enthusiast.

Or  if it were modern times, one might speculate that he could possibly be taking a photo to advertise his puppies for sale on Craigslist.

He appears to be a solidly-built man with stocky, well-muscled shoulders, and wears a long-sleeved shirt, a tie and an Indiana Jones sort of hat.

But the mysterious quality of it derives not so much from any of those details, but his head and face – or what can be seen of them.

His head is tilted slightly downward as he looks at his puppies, with his hat slanting at a slightly jaunty angle, covering all but his nose and mouth.  And they are both cast into the shadows by the brim of his hat in the bright, mid-day sunlight.

You can just barely make out his nose in the shadows, and it’s hard to decide if you can glimpse a Mona Lisa type smile beneath, or it’s just the imagination.

On the back of the photo, in clean, clear penmanship is written in Danish, “Me with my dogs.”

Trying to make out the facial characteristics in the shadows of the brim, Kenneth imagines he sees a striking resemblance to his wife’s family, but it’s hard to tell for sure with just the essence of details.

He asks around, but nobody seems to have any idea who the man is or where the photo was taken.  He’s mystified.

Then he comes across another photo that piques his interest.  It is of six children ranging in age from about two to thirteen or so, sitting on the ground with two of the same puppies and what looks like a straggly cane-type plant or oleander bush behind them.

On the back of this one, written in the same beautiful hand, is a clue to the identity of the mysterious man.  It lists the names of the children in the photo: “Asta. Oliver. Gerda. Amy (with the name Blackwood beneath). Ada. Peter.”

But no one looking through the photos has any idea who the Blackwood children are.  The mystery nags at Kenneth, and for the next four or five years, he tries searching the interenet far and wide looking for the connection of the Blackwood children, the mysterious man, and his wife’s family.

In 2007 I was invited to go back to my childhood home in the Virgin Islands for a high school reunion, even though I didn’t actually graduate with the class.  (I graduated from a high school 3,000 miles away in California.) 

But had I remained on the island, I’d have been a part of their graduating class.  Besides, the reunion came about as a result of the first few of us who began tracking down the others from wherever the four winds had sent them.

And so that summer, I spent ten wonderful days there at the home of my best friend from grade school.  And sitting there at her dining room table one night with her husband, I told him I’d always dreamed of writing a book – a historical fiction piece set in St. Croix.

Then for the next year, I did intensive background research in all things, Crucian (having to do with St. Croix): history, customs, flora and fauna, even tracing family trees of many of the islands families back through the centuries.

And I spent the following year writing the novel, finally publishing it in November of 2009.

In February of 2010, Mr. Mossburg resumed his quest to solve the mystery of the man with his dogs, and the elusive Blackwell children on Ancestry.com – the country’s foremost family history web site. 

Finally, getting nowhere, he decided to try searching for the children individually rather than as a family.  And only then did he come across some of the research I’d done on my island family histories.

And lo and behold, he found that Asta, Oliver, Gerda, Ada, and Peter were not Blackwoods at all, but were Skovs – the children of Peter Jens Skov – the mystery man in the first photo.  And Amy Blackwood was their half-sister; Jens’s step-daughter.

When he found the Skov/Blackwell family lived not in Denmark, but in the Virgin Islands, the puzzle seemed to deepen even more.  How did a photo of a family in the Caribbean wind up in an old box of photos in the attic of a home in Denmark?

So last Monday when I opened my email box, I was surprised to find a letter from a man I’d never heard of in Sweden!  He had found my notes on the Skov family of St. Croix and wanted to know how they were related to the Mossburg/Schweitz family of Sweden and Denmark. 

I had to admit that I had no clue whatsoever!  And the Skovs that I knew still living on island were very unlikely to have any interest in family genealogy – or even have internet.  But I promised him I’d ask around next May on my trip down there.

Then, on a hunch, I tried to look around on Facebook to see if I could find any of the children of Asta, Oliver, Gerda, Ada, and Peter. 

We’d known them as Aunt Asta, Uncle Oliver and Uncle Peter – and Uncle Teddy who was not yet born at the time of the picture.  And they were all the younger half-siblings of Uncle Clarence Blackwood of whom I’ve already written in he story of Uncle Clarence.

And what do you know!  I came across Jean-Pierre, the youngest son of Uncle Pete, right there on Facebook.  I sent off a note to him (in Rhode Island) telling him of the photo, and Mr. Mossburg in Sweden, and our puzzle.

Jean-Pierre (or John now) told me Uncle Pete is still living there (at 91) in his hilltop house across Teague Bay from ours – right above the goat farm and Uncle Clarence’s dock!

So he printed out the photos I’d emailed him, along with my questions from Mr. Mossburg and the info I’d sent him on their family history tracing back to 1801, and sent them off (snail mail) to Uncle Pete and his son, Carlos, back home.

Not quite a miracle, but as close as you can get in a time of technology.  The long-lost photo (some eighty years in transit) has found its way back to its rightful family.  And at least the first part of the puzzle has been solved.

Now we just have to wait to see if this will strike a chord in the 91-yr-old memory of dear old Uncle Pete.  Maybe Mr. Mossburg in Sweden will find his connection – via email from me in California, via email from the grandson of the mysterious man with the dogs (now living in Rhode Island), via snail mail across the Caribbean from Uncle Pete.

It is, indeed, a small, small world!