Ghosts Of The Past & Devils Of The Present
Quentin Hardy's Curiosity Shop
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Ghosts Of The Past & Devils Of The Present<br>We'll explain ourselves with ever more data, but we'll still probably wing our stories.
Quentin Hardy<br>Aug 16, 2026
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This is a story about data and certainty. It began in century-old genealogy, and ends with contemporary misinformation.<br>Last week I went through a small pile of my grandmother’s papers, specifically those dealing with her attempts, some 90 years ago, at building out her family tree. She was born in 1889, and seems to have been working from some notes that her father wrote about his forebears sometime around 1910. Those jottings touched 1792.<br>Early on, I found out that grandma had a half-sister seven years her senior, from a father whose disappearance went unexplained. I don’t believe this had ever been mentioned to me. The stepsister was adopted by my great-grandfather, but doesn’t seem to have lived with the family. She later married and lived in St. Louis, but when she died aged 22 she was buried in the family’s graveyard in Kansas. If you’re anything like me, you’re already noodling on how all these mysterious fragments might hang together. Who was this person, and what sort of life did she have?
As I May Gather: A chart I made to keep the people, and recollections about them, in some kind of order. William Johnson, 1826-1890, was remembered as “a magnificent specimen of physical manhood, honest and conscientious. Transacted a great deal of business.” Sic Transit Gloria.<br>There were letters from my grandmother’s cousins, people I’d never heard of, who told stories of unknown uncles who’d fought for years in the Civil War, accepted victory garlands in Washington, and died of consumption on the march home. One of grandma’s uncles was named Commodore Perry Bebee, in honor of the Admiral who opened Japan to the U.S. in 1853, the year of his birth. He wrote back to Kansas from Santa Monica, expressing his loneliness following the strange death of his wife in 1934.1 He had also been unknown to me until then, but his pain was vivid.<br>Every time I found out something about someone, I wrote up their story in my head. Imagining their experiences enriched my sense of my own life. I found myself seizing on the smallest bit of data (a father and son who died two months apart) to build a story (in 1863! They must have both been killed in the Civil War!), complete with twists (they came from Appalachian Missouri! - which side did they fight for?) When I found out that the fragment about them was wrong (they’re not Missouri Babcocks, they’re Kansas Bebees!), I rewrote their story.<br>Days of doing this made me realize that, whoever you are, you’re not many steps from confusion about how you got here, particularly as more data continues to show up. For the most part, few of us admit the uncertainty of our stories, whether in parsing our roots or ourselves. In our daily lives we ignore most of our ever-branching considerations, so our hindsight has straighter lines, something closer to a linear narrative we can own. Psychology teaches that we often misremember things, rewriting them so they cohere to current needs. Do a little genealogy, and you do that in real time, with distant relations.
Cyrus Hardy, 1818-1878. Also from the trove. Seems like another magnificent specimen to me.<br>Data demands a story, and the more we relate to the data, the more urgent the story becomes. Relatives multiple removes from me were genetically as closely related to me as strangers I’d pass in the street. They became interesting because my grandmother collected their stories as part of my family history. So I built on that story, more than I would have if the anecdotes arrived from an unfamiliar source.<br>Share<br>This experience of data scraps and stories reminded me of something I wrote last December:
Then there is the technology that rotted…There is much evidence, like the remains of deep water fish bones found in East Timor, that homo sapiens repeatedly took to the water 42,000 years ago. The aboriginal settlement of Australia seems to have involved some 1,000 people, almost certainly traveling in multiple vessels over hundreds of miles of open water, some 40,000 years ago. Then they stopped sailing. This technology story is mostly lost to time because ships are made of perishable materials. Stone axes endure.<br>In other words, the data we find is the data that dictates the story. Technology that was hewn, moulded, or woven rotted. Stone tools endured, and so we say our forebears lived in the Stone Age.<br>At first glance, we have the opposite problem today. I sorted my grandmother’s genealogy efforts with the aid of Family Search, a capacious genealogy service run by the Mormon Church, an outfit that believes families are united in the afterlife, and offers members the option to include the long dead in contemporary ceremonies. They have uploaded a truly astonishing number of documents,...