Ælfwine
According to Wikipedia,
that’s “an Old English personal name. It is composed of the
elements ælf 'elf' and wine 'friend', continuing a
hypothetical Common Germanic given name *albi-winiz which is also
continued in Old High German and Lombardic.”₁
“Alewine” (or the other
modern spelling, “Alawine”), broken apart, is more prosaic. Perhaps our
ancestors were wine-sellers, or perhaps not, given the etymology of the
name.
But I prefer to be a friend
of the elves. J.R.R. Tolkien used “Ælfwine” to mean that; what was good enough for John Ronald Reuel will
certainly be good enough for me.
And
yet my purpose is not myth or fantasy, but detective work and family research. I
am grateful to have the Internet to help me do these tasks; when I began, years
ago, I pored over microfiche and microfilm rolls for many long hours in the
libraries, leaving sometimes at the end of a very long day, feeling as if my
eyes had been sandpapered. No Google searches in those days.
I will start with this photo,
taken sometime in 1903. I judge the date by looking at the child my grandmother
is holding on her lap in the right-hand side of the picture. I know who the
child was, and I know her date of birth, so the age of the photo can be
ascertained by that.
That’s the way I am—I must
have some proof for things before putting them out there as facts. That’s the
way this blog will work.
There are all sorts of
legends, family stories, tragic tales that we’ll get into eventually. And I had
a co-conspirator in those early days! I intend to post letters he and I wrote
to each other, unraveling those mysteries that my own father had told me when I
was a young teenager.
That co-conspirator was Alton
Alawine, a cousin three times my age when I began corresponding with him, a man
I loved and hold in memories both sweet and bitter.
Alton was afflicted with
macular degeneration and couldn’t use the Internet effectively, in spite of
magnifiers and extra-large font and so on. The memories tainted sharp and
bitter for me all are related to how his vision issues made it impossible for
him to find the one tiny piece of devastating information that, for me and my
daughter Erin, took about 5 minutes to locate…and which basically made
worthless a few years of diligent work on his part.
That is our first mystery! I’ll
address it sometime soon.
So I think of how much he
would’ve been able to do, if he’d been able to see a while longer. And I will
dedicate this blog now to him.
