Looking Back

It was such an unexpected find. I’d assumed the archives might hold the court papers representing the estate settlement of Willie’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather—but I certainly hadn’t expected to see the individual receipts that made up the settlement. Line after line, page after page: “XXX to XXX for XXX,” followed by tiny slips of paper bearing the signatures of those who had received their share of the inheritance. There was even a receipt for the coffin, which felt both practical and oddly personal at the same time.

I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe to feel nervous handling paper that was nearly two centuries old—but it was more than that. Some of the writing was smudged, but for anyone schooled in cursive, it was surprisingly easy to read. What startled me most was seeing the actual signatures of so many ancestors. The men had carefully written their names, each stroke deliberate; the women, however, were represented by a simple “X” with “her mark” written beneath by someone else. A quiet reminder of how the world once worked.

The texture of the paper itself was peculiar—almost see-through but with a slight roughness. The edges were uneven, torn from a larger sheet rather than cut cleanly. I held each piece gingerly, not just because it was fragile, but because it felt… precious.

Tucked among the receipts was a three-page inventory: horses, hogs, cows, leather hides, blacksmith tools, seven chairs, two chests, a lady’s side saddle, cooking pots, even a razor. It read like a snapshot of everyday life two centuries past. Suddenly, the people who had always been just names on a page were sitting in those chairs, riding those horses, heating those cooking pots.

Standing in that archive room, with my fingers resting on paper they had touched, it felt less like looking into history and more like shaking hands across time.