I commence typing on this 6th of December in 1991, the day before my Grandfather's funeral. Theodore C. Torgerson celebrated 100 Thanksgivings; it was a few weeks after his 12th Thanksgiving on a windy day in North Carolina that a man first flew a powered aircraft under control. Just a few weeks ago, after his 100th Thanksgiving, a space shuttle seared a path through the sky over the Pacific Ocean as it returned from space and glided smoothly back to the flat desert in southern California. I will be 100 in 2061. What will be commonplace then which I cannot even imagine now?
With the world changing so quickly around us, the only thing we can hold onto with any certainty is our family. And even that is ultimately temporary, as generation after generation make their journey through time and become history. I never knew any of my eight great-grandparents. But, I know that my grandparents lives were shaped by them, and I know my grandparents and my parents shaped my life. We are a product of our ancestors, and as I thought about the immense upheavals and changes in the world that my late grandfather had seen, I wondered even more how all my ancestors had come together from the four corners of the world to place me here tonight to begin writing about them, and how might they have shaped my life.
While reading letters from one of my great grandfathers, Joseph Slagg, which were penned during the Civil War, a great curiosity was being fostered in me. Living today in the South, surrounded by the now historic places he visited and sent those letters from, I could see him and his bedraggled comrades slogging past the giant oak trees trimmed with tangled spanish moss hung like tinsel from a Christmas tree. I could hear the cannons fire and soldiers cry out as I walked among the markers and memorials at Shiloh, the dark clouds quietly weeping for those still buried under my feet.
I began to appreciate the trials and hardships my ancestors had to face; being packed like sardines into a glorified rowboat, and coming to America; the uncertainty of loading ones family into a wagon and riding off into the country; the quirks of living in a house that dad and the family built out of nearby trees. . .
So, I decided to write about them, to take what has already been written by some of our family detectives, put it all together, and add a historical perspective. I hope that this will be enlightening to all who read it, and will encourage those who have recollections or memorabilia to contact me so we can make this story even more complete. It is a story that will never be truly "finished".