Settling into my office one morning, scanning the e-mail, I found a message from one Colin Smith. Got my attention. My father's name was Colin. Mine is too, though to avoid confusion no one in the family had ever called me Colin.
Of course, there are enough Smiths in the world that a few of them were probably Colins. But who was this one?
My cousin, as it turns out. My Uncle Elmore named him after my father. I hadn't known.
We'd been separated for so long that family connections, usually the strongest, had been frayed and torn loose. The questions - whatever happened to my aunts, Ruth and Caroline and Emily, and my uncle Elmore? - had gone unasked for years. One of my twins was named Emily in honor of our lost aunt, but beyond that expression of kinship there had been no contact for almost a half-century.
But then, thanks to the Internet and cousin Colin's curiosity, one half of the family was finding the other half.
Nobody knows exactly why we lost track of each other so completely. There were stories of estrangement involving my grandmother - my father's mother - and my mother. Mostly, though, I think it was simply distance. Smiths on my father's side of the family lived in Oklahoma and Georgia. My mother and sister and I lived in North Carolina - and this was before the age of easy airplane commuting across the country.
Also, because contact was severed so sharply and completely, I never realized that Elmore was 13 years younger than his older brother, my father. If my father were alive today he'd be 100. I assumed Uncle Elmore would have been only a few years younger and that he, too, was dead.
Not at all.
His son, Colin, reported that his dad was alive and well and living in Tucson. We had a few brief telephone conversations and then, this summer, my oldest daughter, Jennifer, and I flew out to Tucson to see Elmore and his wife, Helen.
We spent two days staring at each other, looking for resemblances. We told stories - sagas of star-crossed family members, careers, health crises and temperaments: One aunt had been a talented dancer. My grandfather, Rembert, was a man of firm opinions. My father, much older than Elmore, loved being a big brother.
We sat at the kitchen table reading old letters aloud and naming the people in old photographs. As we did this, I realized, somewhat guiltily, that I had gotten used to the fact that Elmore had essentially disappeared. Such is life. But my children had made no such accommodation. They kept asking about the Smiths, as if something had conspired to deny them half their family history. They had so many cousins and aunts and uncles on the other side of the family. What had happened to them?
After we got back to Maryland, copies of the letters and photographs and documents we'd seen in Arizona arrived in a large envelope. These papers were filled with dates and family names to be scanned more carefully. There were tracings of my grandmother's family, the Frasers, reaching back to the American Revolution and to England and Scotland. There's a photo, developed from a daguerreotype, of Hugh Alexander Fraser, who came to the United States from Scotland and became a landowner of some standing in Marietta, Ga.
There was also a picture of my grandmother's father, Colin McKenzie Fraser, photographed, according to Elmore's careful record-keeping, by Dill & Maier, Whitworth Street over Holbrook's Hat Store in Atlanta.
There was an "In Memoriam" program printed for the funeral of my grandmother, Ruth Fraser Smith, who died in 1948. Also a picture of her in an elaborate, flowing dress and a lush, flowery white hat perched lightly on a bundle of dark brown hair. My grandfather, Rembert, had been a teacher at Emory University before becoming an itinerant Methodist minister, accepting calls to one church after another and never staying more than a year or two.
After his last posting, he became a newspaper columnist in Houston. There was a letter from the Methodist bishop of Dallas thanking him for his pamphlet, "Communism versus Civilization," and sending $25 to help with distribution.
My grandfather worried about the Communist Party and thought it had too much support in the church. He wrote several books on the subject, sounding the alarm. One was called "Moscow Over Methodism"; another, "Is This the Hour?" Workers of the world, he said, had a point. They were exploited. But the pamphlet warned, "Should communism triumph, it will slaughter civilization and bury it deep in an unmarked grave. ... If it gains and uses the power it covets, there will be an era far worse than the Dark Ages in Europe."
Elmore's research uncovered a letter describing the life of Isaac Smith, one of Rembert's forebears, to a grandson of Isaac's. Isaac Smith was a so-called "exhorter" in the Methodist church who lived in the 1800s.
"At one period, I think about 1817, there was a disposition among the slaves near [Isaac's] home ... to get up an insurrection, but happily the plot was detected in its incipient state. The slaves afterward confessed that they were to have murdered all the white men except your grandfather, and him they intended to spare that he might preach to them," according to the letter.
My grandfather, Rembert, inherited the "exhorter" gene from Isaac. Conjuring with the mystery of inherited inclinations, I find myself wondering if he wrote anything more of the workers' plight - more than his concern that communism might win their hearts and minds. That victory didn't come, of course, and I think his writing became part of the long accumulation of evidence that led finally to the fall of that ideology. Exhortation may seem at the time to be its own reward, but its force can build and become manifest in action.
I know I inherited this much. He was concerned about our democratic system, determined to extol its virtues and to alert his congregations to what he saw as dangerous forces. In the face of other threats - a weakened press, the corrosive power of money, voter suppression - I'm as much an exhorter as he.
I had an array of reactions to these revelations. I felt validated, as if things had unfolded according to a plan. And, as much as I had stepped away from family, I felt lifted up by the remnants. There is something, too, in being lost - and found.
When Elmore headed off to military service in World War II, my grandfather wrote him a long letter enumerating those family members "who have fought for the Stars and Stripes in the past."
There were many Confederates in this group - grandfather making no distinction, on the subject of defending home ground, between the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes. The listing of soldier ancestors began with Isaac Smith, who had joined Gen. George Washington's band in Virginia. He was wounded several times, suffered the cold of Valley Forge and eventually served as an aide to the Marquis de LaFayette - "with whom he corresponded after La Fayette returned to France."
As to his own military service, Grandfather Smith wrote, "I offered to serve in World War I with the YMCA or as a chaplain, but they did not get to me. Before that war, I believed for a while that the Christian religion forbade taking part in war, but I gave up that belief for the conviction that I still have. It is that there is no higher Christian duty than to defend on the battlefield your loved ones, your friends, your fellow citizens, your country when you are attacked by enemies. ... You are doing that. We hope, believe and pray that you will come back safe to us."
Elmore did return, of course. He had a long career with one of the major oil companies, exhorting his employers to be scrupulous in their accounting practices. He and his four children and their grandchildren try to meet every summer in Crested Butte, Colo., where Elmore has a summer home.
Our family is scattered even more broadly across the nation, but I believe there is sentiment for a reunion of these reunited Smiths.
C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays in The Sun. His e-mail is fsmith@wypr.org.