Someone should remember

I know I haven't posted a while. It's partially because I'm so busy with school and with life in general that I don't really have the energy to put it into here, but it's partially because of genealogy.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have had an on-again off-again love relationship with genealogy. I love to look and find out where I came from, what those people looked like, what their stories were. This feels like it's filling in something integral to me - these people's stories have contributed to me, their faces are my face, and their genes are my genes. I want to be able to tell my daughter where she came from. I just cannot overstate how important this has always been to me; however, as my attention span is rather short, my ability to invest time and energy into it is sporadic at best.

I've been on an about two-month-long kick recently, though, with shorter kicks preceding that. I am integrating an awful lot of family (having just been hitched), and all the same reasons apply to this family.

This search has led me to a dead end that I find immensely frustrating and depressing. Maybe this is partially because I've only recently found my home as a feminist, but this particular story deeply bothers me.

I have an ancestor. Her name was Sarah Bonner. She was my great-great grandmother. She was married to an ancestor of mine who was named Walter Ricks, and he had had prior wives, one of whom tried to divorce him for cruelty (the judge denied her and her father had to come rescue her). (Ancestral scars run deep; see my prior posts. None of this is a surprise - this was on my maternal grandfather's side. Wounded people beget wounded people.)

There is no record of this woman anywhere other than a picture that a distant cousin sent me and that we know her name and when she was probably born. No death records. No grave. We simply know who she was, or, rather, that she was.

There's a small chance that she might have been a person of color, but we think that we know who her parents were based on common location; however, there are no records of her, so we cannot be sure, and the picture of her looks like, if she had been a person of color, she could have easily passed as white, so we have no way of knowing. (The difficulties in finding records on her might be explained by that, though, if it is the case.)

It's thought that my great-great grandfather possibly, essentially, made her disappear.

I want to know who she was, if she suffered, when she died, how she died, what her life was like. She's like the face of all these faceless women in the family tree who weren't thought worth recording. I want to know who she was.

It's weird how much it hurts. Sarah Bonner deserved better.

All of them did.