Ælfwine

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.