My family has called New Jersey home for five generations. My great-great-grandfather Anders arrived from Sweden in 1887 with seventeen dollars and a letter of introduction to a cousin who had come over five years earlier. He worked the iron mines outside Newark for nine years before he had enough saved to send for the woman he loved back in Stockholm. She arrived in 1896. They married three weeks later. They had eight children. Six survived to adulthood. My great-grandfather was the youngest.
He was the first in our family to graduate high school. His son — my grandfather — was the first to attend college, on the GI Bill after Korea. My father was the first to start a business. I was the first to lose one, and the first to start another. My son is in his second year at the state university in Newark, the same campus my grandfather attended seventy-three years ago.
When my grandfather passed in 2008, we found in his desk a single sheet of paper, folded in fourths, written in pencil. It was a list, in his handwriting, of every member of our family who had come before him — going back to Anders, with dates next to each name. At the bottom, in slightly different ink, he had added my name, and my sister's name, and the names of my children. He had been keeping the list updated for sixty years.
This hex is for that list. For every name on it. For every dinner table where someone said grace before eating because their parents had said grace before them. For 138 years of one small family making their way through one large country. Thank you, America. We are still here.