FIRST PERSON
to take a “shopping trip.” Indeed, we had a choice among several frames, and we selected an ornate one.
Just for silliness, though, we also took home an ugly, white, wooden frame that housed the death certificate of a soul who had passed away in 1906. Unlike the sterile death certificates of today, this one contained the elaborately scrolled name of the deceased as well as his dates of birth and death.
We stuck it in our barn along with a few other treasures we had acquired without any real intent of using them. There the wooden frame sat for several years before Ted fetched it from the barn thinking it might be fun to hang on a dining- room wall along with our display of antiques.
I reluctantly agreed. After all, who hangs a death certificate in their dining room?
In the meantime, we attended a summer reunion of grandmother’s family — a large clan of Morgans who lived on a farm on Smoky Row Road near Linworth.
We spread a large piece of butcher paper on a picnic table and began drawing my grandmother’s family tree. Nine children in all: Milton, John, Jasper, Luther, Iva, Grace, Effie, Alice and Frank (my grandmother — yes, Frank!). We spent that afternoon remembering facts about as many of those children as we could and trying to recall their children’s names.
A few months later, as I walked near the death certificate still hanging in our dining room, I felt a strange magnetism to it. A subliminal message struck me: “Look at me! Look at me!”
I thought. Because I was passing by, I did take a closer look. The deceased person’s name, it turns out, was Jasper Morgan, who was born Nov. 21, 1883, and died July 11, 1906. We invite readers of all ages to submit a personal essay of musings or refl ections for First Person. The guidelines:
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A submission used becomes the property of The Dispatch; it cannot be reproduced elsewhere without our permission. another picture hanging next to the death certificate depicted a group of characters sitting in front of the train station in Elmwood, since renamed Linworth. I shouldn't have been surprised to later learn that Uncle Jasper was in the photo.
What's more, a diary of my great- grandmother Morgan's that was sitting on the dining- room buffet included a handwritten entry about her son Jasper, his precious life and untimely death.
The mystery still remains unsolved as to the path that the framed picture took, but anything that goes haywire in our house is inevitably blamed on Uncle Jasper.
Coincidentally or not, our house sits next to a historic one- room schoolhouse in Perry Township where Uncle Jasper's sister — my grandmother — was the schoolmarm at the time of his death.
Even though I didn't know my great Uncle Jasper, I place flowers at his gravesite in Walnut Grove Cemetery each Memorial Day.
I think he would have liked that.