the family tree & orange soda

Have you ever entered your name in an internet search just to see where it would take you? I never thought that the very first search result would actually be about me (Melissa Reagan is a pretty common name). But there it was, my Grandfather's name in the first result -- his name is not so common: Christopher Columbus Reagan, born November 10, 1881.

It was a link to my dad's family tree that went all the way back to Timothy Ragan, born in Maryland in 1678. I didn't know anything of my family's history; both of my grandfathers had died well before I was born. Both grandmothers died when I was very young. I didn't know either of them very well since they lived in different states. In the few times I saw them as a little girl, neither one passed on any of our story to me. So there I was, looking at names that I wasn't familiar with; names linked together that somehow ended up with me, the youngest child of Paul & Shirley Reagan.

There are so many questions I would like to ask, like what country did Timothy Ragan's family come from? Why was the spelling of our name changed? Why did my great, great, great grandfather move from Maryland to Tennessee? What was life like for these people?

I feel so far removed. When Daddy died, there was really only one thing of his that I wanted: a book on the history of the Pittman Community Center. Located just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, it's the place that Daddy was born and raised. There were some pictures in there that, for some reason, I just cherish. One was of my Grandfather, C.C. "Lum" Reagan, taking the doctor on a house call in his horse-drawn wagon. Another was of my dad as a young boy in the "Aeronautics Club" of his school. And there's one of my two aunts as precious little girls walking across a footbridge with their brother, Frankie.

It's such a mystery -- all these people linked to my name have their own stories, but I don't know them. I wish I did. I wish I knew what it was like for my daddy growing up on the farm, but I could never get him to open up more than a sentence or two about it. Maybe that's why the book was so important to me. With it, I can imagine my dad as a happy young boy smiling for the camera with a mischievous look in his eye. I imagine that just after the picture was taken, Daddy doing something totally boyish, like pushing the boy kneeling beside him over. I don't know; it was just the look in his eye that made me think he was up to something. I have a feeling that, being the youngest, and handsome as he was, he was the little darling of the family. And I'll bet that "little Paulie", as his sisters always called him, probably got away with a lot of stuff.

In one of the few times I caught a glimpse of Daddy's boyhood was when he showed me a place where there used to be an old country store that he and his brother Frank would walk to. It was the place where he had his first soda. I asked him what kind it was. He said, "If I remember right, it was an orange soda." Orange Soda. There was something almost magical in that memory; something that really defined a generation that seems so far removed from my own. I don't remember my first soda at all; it was so commonplace in my home that it almost ran like water.

So there are the names of my ancesters for as long as they've been in America, put out on the internet by a man that I don't even know. Maybe some day I'll look him up and find out his story, and how it's linked to mine. Or maybe I'll just wait until Heaven, where I'll no longer look through a glass, darkly, but will see face to face, then shall I know even as also I am known (I Corinthians 13:12). And there it is--that true, undeniable need to know and be known...