Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,16

Una.

“I guess I shouldn’t let him get to me like that. Hey, people lose their jobs all the time, and the powerful have stomped on the little guy from time immemorial.”

“You’re only human. That’s why I still love you.”

She was late for the meeting the next morning, and hung-over. Ignoring the terrible throbbing in her head and the indignant stare of the Usurper, she smiled with a private joy and inhaled the invigorating aroma of her coffee.

.

4

Balazar. An uncommon name, Nick found over the next week.

He checked a few favorite reference sources first, many of which he had on his crowded office shelves: bound indexes of early Louisiana censuses, Gulf and Atlantic port-entry records, state birth and death indexes, state military service lists.

No dice.

Today he headed for the New Orleans Public Library.

Summer is the most popular time of the year for beginners in genealogy. Students have lots of free time, and families pile into their vans for vacations. Amateurs who have knocked their heads against bureaucratic walls of correspondence all year flock to libraries around the country for a few days of frenzied searching.

Nick could tell them that some rural county courthouses would probably be a better place to spend their summer days; and they could perhaps learn more from that aged distant cousin in the retirement home in Florida. The desire to do something, anything, drives these eager amateurs from one how-to book to the next, from one library genealogical section to another, without much to show for their labor when they get home except a much thinner wallet.

The librarians who staff the genealogical sections, usually calm and polite during the rest of the year, become testy and unhelpful during the summer. Rarely do they point out to these pesky beginners the riches of their facilities, such as wonderful old maps and manuscripts that don’t appear in the general card catalogs, material which might hold in dusty, crumbling pages the crucial bit of information–say, for instance, that a state carved County X from Counties Y and Z at the end of the eighteenth century, and that Old Great-great Uncle Pete, who seems to be nowhere around during the period in question, lived in that often overlooked county, or parish in Louisiana.

Nick tried to avoid searching microfilm at public libraries during this hectic time of the year. Microfilm viewers could be tied up all day during June, July, and August, or so overworked that most were out of commission, awaiting repair.

Now, here on the third floor of the library, the crush was as bad as he’d ever seen it. Full sign-up sheets hung from every viewing machine, and the fiftieth person that hour had just asked the harried librarian at the counter for copier change. A friend of Nick’s, she looked at him across the crowded room and made a gun of her hand and put it to her temple. Stressed to the screaming point, poor woman.

The dozen or so round cream-colored Formica-covered tables were packed with researchers. The uncomfortable wooden chairs around the tables played hell with a hundred sacroiliacs. Nick wandered for a few minutes, half-heartedly looking for a place to light, wishing just a few of these rookies would throw in the towel and give him a crack at their family history impasse. The big room reeked with the public funk of too many people who’d sweated and cooled too many times in the New Orleans oven outside. Conversations rose to distracting levels from the stacks, as retirees droned on about who begot whom in their families.

“Excuse me, ma’am, is this seat taken?” Nick asked an overweight, bug-eyed, wheezing woman with thin hair dyed henna.

She said nothing and merely raked a large mound of books and papers toward her. But she did favor him with a withering glare, as if he’d just asked her to do something extremely objectionable to her moral sense.

He worked for a few minutes in the stacks, frustrated to find that most of the books he needed were out–probably in the possession of the ogreish woman at the table.

Nick was treating Corban’s familial oral tradition with a large grain of salt–a wise course for a genealogist. Much of the time, the sort of legend the old man related only confuses and misdirects the uncritical family historian. Take for example the common one that tells of three brothers who emigrated from the Old Country. One stayed in the New World base, where they landed, one went west, and the other south. The brothers, of