While most people celebrate Father’s Day

While most people celebrate Father’s Day replete with breakfast rutuals, all I can say is that, for me, it’s complicated—as I had an absentee father (and mother). I knew almost nothing about my father’s side of the family, other than their family was from County Cork, by way of Boston. Lace curtain Irish. I also knew that my father’s mother, my grandmother, committed suicide at an early age, and that her husband, my grandfather, a San Francisco policeman, died soon after, of TB, leaving the teenage boy an orphan, to be raised by an unfit uncle. 

My father’s untold story began to emerge via those scanned photos making the intangible absentee father—somewhat tangible. I first began my scanning odyssey way back in 2015, when we cleaned out my matriarchal grandmother’s house and we found boxes of old photos. Some were from my mother, many from my Aunt Jane—who apparently had a thing for my father—which goes a long way in explaining the sisters lifelong enmity toward each other. And a shoebox collection of my father’s photos mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s.

In my father’s collection, a photo of an unknown woman with a baby raised a red flag. But no real answers. So many surprises, all the random photos that fleshed out distant fragments of memory, which led to new unanswerable questions. These scans of my father were all from prints. Hard copy. So many photos were badly damaged, cloning became my new art form. I also scanned my cousin Sinead Dinsmore’s huge photo collection, adding to the complex multi-generational extended family story. 

Then my friend, Donna Champion bought me a spiffy spit-kit, where I eventually discovered distant relatives on my father’s side, a huge unknown. Still piecing together that family tree, but now I know my great-grandparents’ names on my father’s side. My grandmother Viola Heaney married Joe Hurley, Sr. 

That DNA kit also gave me closure on the photo of that unknown woman and child. Four years later, the scanned photographs abutting new DNA results, yielded new information. My father had a son, I had a half-brother, who in turn, had two sons—both adopted out. Their DNA found me. 

I found an Alaskan connection by way of adoption, which led to the discovery of another generation. When I was first contacted, I denied all connection, but when I delved deeper, I began to find that they were correct, we were related after all. It seems that we all grew up fatherless. Substance abuse, my half-brother’s genetic inheritance, facilitated the two boys adoption. Ironic that my grandmother Viola’s father had a brewery in San Francisco. 

Hopefully, those adopted boys, my nephews, are celebrating Father’s Day with real joy, their adoptive fathers filling the void by stepping into the shoes my father and his son could not fill. And no, none of us have met each other. Hopefully the abusive gene has played out its hand, and these young men whom I cannot yet call brother, or nephew, do not carry that destructive gene.

And I found an old lineage lhread leading back to Nova Scotia, Antigonish, by way of Cork, Ireland, I found a far-distant French and Native connection I could not ameleorate. And then, in a flash, I understood, the Algonquin connection that spanned the eastern seaboard, the Acadians, the trail of tears. My great grandfather, Henry Hurley’s wife. Still don’t have the link from County Cork to Nova Scotia but I suspect it was a forced immigration from the great famine.

As I scanned photos, I began to put the story together, the generic rage I held against my father for abandoning me as a child, began to ameliorate, and morph into something else. Perhaps a vague understanding. My orphaned father, raised by a vitriolic alcoholic uncle—the model was at hand. The uncle left the shipyards of Boston to raise a nephew in San Francisco, instilled a lifetime of rage in my father who sought solace in the bottle. Talk about complex feelings. Sometimes there are glimmerings of forgiveness, like faint stars on the horizon.

In the summer of 2019, I began scanning my black and white negatives, I bought an Epson Perfection 550 negative and film scanner, to scan my Brownie Mary negatives for an upcoming traveling exhibit, which worked fairly well—except for it refused to read my low light black and white negatives—the majority of my work. It auto-crops. And you can’t tell it No! 

The scanner chopped up Beat poet Michael McClure to tiny bits as he always wore black and blended into the background. Alors! Ditto that with Rexroth, Forché, and Kizer. I tried everything including outlining the edges of the negative with a Sharpie. Nothing worked. At least my Gary Snyder and Allan Ginsberg pix weren’t chiaroscuro images.

Still to (re)do, the massive poet archives from the 1980s and 90s. (I’ve done quite a bit already, but I want to redo many of them as the scanner was challenged by them). Carolyn Forché was instrumental in spurring me on to tackle this massive project. Thank you, Carolyn. 

Still to do: I need to finish my color travel negatives (USSR, S. America, Europe—all on hold, as I tackled my huge photo-journalism archives from the 1980s-90s as the massive California wildfires raged on the next ridge over—giving me a rather renewed sense of urgency), and some random family negatives. I’ve evacuated twice now, just to up the stress levels. Negatives weigh a lot. Lugging then around was not a joy. 

Winter 2020, right before lockdown, I scanned my mother’s cousin’s Patricia D'Arcy’s extensive collection, adding new chapters and nuanced layers to the family story. Aunts, uncles, and their shared many of the same events. Different angles. Imagine finding new photos of your great-grandmother you never even knew existed. There are more elderly relatives collections to scan, but COVID put a halt to that.

But I need a much better scanner, specifically the Epson Perfection 850 Pro with duel lenses—now astromically expensive and rarer than hen’s teeth used. People are charging full resale price and then some, for used elderly technology. I spend time trolling eBay looking for a sweet deal. Anyone out there have one?