My Great-grandparents

I have a photo on my desk of my great-grandparents, my mother's maternal grandparents, John Stevenson (1857-1940) and Isabella Mitchell Stevenson (1859-1936).
Judging by their apparent ages, the photos must have been taken around 1920. My great-grandmother is wearing a very old-fashioned outfit consisting of a long-sleeved black dress with lace on the collar and cuffs, a long string of pearls, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, with her gray hair in a bun; she is somewhat stout and she holds a Bible in her lap. My great-grandfather wears a three-piece suit with a knit tie and wire-rimmed glasses; he is thin and somewhat bald.
They were both natives of Scotland, and my great-grandmother's parents were themselves natives of Ulster: part of that great group of people, known as the Scotch-Irish in this country, who settled large parts of the U.S. and gave it its distinctive culture, places like Kentucky and Tennessee. Think of hillbillies, bluegrass music, whisky distilling, and revival meetings, and that will give you a good idea of the singular contribution of the Scotch-Irish to America.
But my great-grandparents immigrated later, around 1890, according to my rough guesses. The story told in our family about John Stevenson is that he was a sailor in the British merchant marine, that he became ill on ship, and had to be put ashore in New Orleans. After his convalescence, he traveled up the Mississippi and homesteaded in North Dakota. All the while his wife and five children were still in Ayr, Scotland; after he got his homestead going he sent for them. The story is also told that they arrived in Nova Scotia penniless, and that a black porter on a train fed them, after which they always had a kindly attitude toward blacks.
How long they lived in North Dakota I don't know, but I do know that it was rough, my grandmother actually having lived in a sod house there during part of her youth. They had five more children, for a total of ten, and later moved to Milwaukee, where both of my parents were born. My great-grandmother became a Pentecostal Christian, one of the few personal facts I know about her. And, my great-grandparents separated at some point and lived apart for many years.
The photo sits on my desk, with their kindly faces looking down on me; we, of course, never met, yet I owe some unknown quantity of my being to them. I often have a hard time looking at photographs of people who have been prominent in my life, for they somehow seem to evoke emotions which I don't wish to have, a mingling of shame and regret and Lord knows what else. But these photos of my great-grandparents don't do that to me. I look with admiration and pride at these refugees from the British Isles who had an undoubtedly hard life and who yet had the natural tenacity of the Scots.
One normally inherits one's name, culture, and religion patrilineally, and so I inherited my name (an Irish one), my religion (Roman Catholic), and a few other cultural traits (e.g. love of strong drink) from my father. But my mother's side was entirely Protestant and mainly Scottish. So I owe so much of what I am to that Protestant and Scottish side, and in recent years I've discovered just what a great people they were, and are.
We will not live long in people's memories after we die. Very few of us make the kind of notable contributions to learning or art that will make our names live on. If not for these photographs, John and Isabella Mitchell Stevenson would be but names to me. And as it is, I can only gaze in wonder at them, and in turn wonder at the mystery of who we are, and the strange turns of life which make us that way. I can only thank my great-grandparents for what they unknowingly did for me; since I do not believe in an afterlife I do not believe that they can appreciate my thanks. Perhaps that makes it all the more important to me that I feel grateful to them.