Looking for Edgar, Finding Frank and Jesse

My mother always insisted that we were related to Edgar Allan Poe. Her mother had told her so, and my maternal grandmother, an exceedingly pious, serious-faced woman who tended to keep very good track of her ancestors, was not the kind to lie about a thing like that. We also had a movie star in the family: a man who worked as an extra in every shoestring western and obscure science fiction flick you could think of, whose success we all monitored closely. There were other poets in the family too: an aunt who wrote sonnets, and my father's mother, a published poet of modest acclaim, but the actor and the movie star were as nothing next to our Poe connection. Everyone in our family loved poetry, and it made perfect sense to us that we should be related to the author of Annabel Lee and The Raven. Oh, the pride.

Some years ago, I got ill and had a long, boring convalescence. To help while away the hours, I decided to check out my genealogy, especially that Poe connection. I was certain that I would find it if I looked hard enough.

At the start, things looked pretty promising. Like Poe's family, my maternal grandmother's ancestors were largely of Irish extraction and many of them had come from Ayrshire in Scotland. The problem was finding out when. I'd always assumed that my ancestors arrived in America in the mid 1800s, but in fact, I was hard pressed to find anyone who showed up after 1720. This surprised me: for some reason, I always pictured my ancestors arriving in the New World rather late in the game, after all the hard work of tree-cutting, planting, and log cabin building was done. In fact, plenty of them were in America before the Mayflower, and not just those who were Native American, either.

I'll spare you all the tiresome stuff about my genealogy -- all of the dozens of surnames and dates, the wars and pensions and wills and censuses. Suffice it to say that if any of the people I managed to trace were related to Edgar Allan Poe, I could not find them. And believe me, if you ever do your own genealogy you will see that one of your big problems is how many people you can find. You start out with four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, then sixteen great-great grandparents -- and pretty soon you are into very serious numbers. Just keeping track of everybody is a huge headache. Genealogy isn't for the organizationally challenged, either: you begin to see that behind every human being is not just a handful of progenitors, but a cast of thousands.

I did find two people I wasn't looking for, though: Frank and Jesse James. Their grandmother Mary Poor was a sister of my great, great, great (you get the idea) grandmother Nancy Poor. I didn't believe it at first, but there is no doubt about the fact that we are cousins. My poor grandmother must have known about this, but never dared to mention it. The shame of being related to homicidal killers must have been mortifying. We're also related to Jesse James' wife, Zerelda. Cousins marrying cousins also ran in their -- well, our -- family.

Someone once told me that Frank and Jesse James weren't the world's greatest shots, that they had to fire a lot of bullets just to hit a target. I have to say that this fits right in with my family: we like poetry just fine, but in a snowball fight or shoot-out, you'd be perfectly safe around us.

Anyway, I'm all finished with my genealogy now. And although I recommend it as an interesting pastime, I have to warn you: if you go looking for poets, you may well end up finding outlaws.