I find genealogies dull reading as a rule; all those generations keep begatting at each other, and the stories of all the people seem to be all the same. When handed a copy of my own family history, however, at a season of the year when I could attend to it, I found myself more than willing to explore.

It seems a man came to America once, from a part of Bavaria now called, I think, Oberfranken, and founded himself a farm along a trail. The trail wound around and through hills, a rough mile or two from the river that carried men west in those days. As the decades passed, that trail became a road that bears my family name, and my family still farms down in that country.

However, if you'll pardon the insertion of my nom de plume, the Charlemagne family farm today is a few more rough miles away from that river, in towards town from Charlemagne Road. I've puzzled at that discrepancy for decades since first noting it, but somehow I had never asked the right person about how that came to be. Reading through the family story of that man who came to America, I was pleased to find the couple of lines that finally tell me that tale.

The man from Oberfranken begat sons, and the sons went on (as sons will) to have sons themselves. The youngest son of the eldest son was the man who had the farm, on the day we joined in the War to End All Wars. That youngest of the eldest must not have noted that very much; in that month he married, with a son of his own arriving some few months later. His joy at the armistice which followed must have been muted as well, because those two years later marked the time when he learned that that first son had contracted a crippling case of polio.

All of us in that line are quiet men, connected to the soil, and I have no difficulty picturing that man walking the ups and downs of that farm lost in thought. I make no doubt that he walked alone and in silence, along each parcel of those lands surrounding the house where he was born. I am sure that he pondered for years what he should do with the news that his doctor had brought him, what he should do for the boy who himself was the news his woman had brought him years before. He kept, I am certain, the closest kind of watch on the lad's polio-afflicted right leg, and prayed every silent prayer he could to mend or mitigate it.

I know the men of my line, and this is how I can be certain of these things. For those who know only me, let me offer as some partial proof the story of what he did next.

That father, upon his son reaching an age for schooling, swapped the farm where he was born for another slightly smaller one with more hills, some miles closer to town. He traded away the only home he had ever known to ensure that his son, regardless of his troubles, would be able to walk to his school.

This is how my family, which is not a one that parts with land lightly, has spent a century away from that land my ancestor first laid claim to. It was done for the kind of reason that forever lays behind the actions of the men of my family, and I found myself nodding in approval as I read.

I trust you won't think this an indulgence: I hope that, somewhere, from wherever he might be looking, that man then looked at what I do and nodded back. The thing about genealogies, you see, is that the stories of all the people seem to be all the same, and I think there might be something of mine that he would recognize from something of his.

I glanced back up the page after reading this story to note again the father's name, after seeing the way he was referred to therein. I was surprised to note they called him by the name on his birth certificate, and let me tell you here why I was surprised.

By all that's sacred, I swear this to you: the name they called that man was Frank.