American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest Read Online Free PDF Page B

unmistakable:
    Married:—Our townsman, Mr. Abraham Stabb, who went to Europe last year, took unto himself a better half. . . . He went to theFather Land for the purpose of visiting his friends and relatives, but he did more than he expected, he lost his heart and found a help meet for life.
    He has our best wishes for a full measure of happiness in his new estate.

Lynne

    I N A UGUST 2012, I spent a night with my husband and children at La Posada. We didn’t stay in Julia’s room; I wasn’t yet ready for a night with the dead. We slept instead in a casita set well away from the house, a thick-walled adobe duplex with a stone patio. We saw no ghosts that night; we heard the groan of a water heater and the snores of our congested daughter—that was it. In the morning, we wandered through the reception area and past the entrance to the old house on the way to breakfast. The grand entry vestibule was dark against the brilliant morning sun, and the children ran quickly past it to the restaurant’s patio and the gardens beyond. My husband, Brent, and I ate breakfast while the kids played hide-and-seek among the coreopsis and sunrose, climbing a gnarled apricot tree that, a nearby sign informed us, Julia had planted a hundred and thirty years before.
    After breakfast, the hotel’s marketing director joined me for a cup of coffee and offered to put me in touch with a writer named Lynne, who had developed an interest in Julia’s story while visiting the hotel on a junket for travel journalists. Lynne had done quite a bit of genealogical research on my family, the marketing director explained, and I was thrilled to hear that there was somebody else tracing Julia’s path.
    When I returned home, I emailed Lynne. She sent me an article she had written about Santa Fe and the hotel, with a sidebar that mentioned Julia’s arrival on the “ship ‘Scotia’” in 1866. I hadn’t known until then which ship Julia had taken. How, I asked her, did she find this out?
    Thus began my introduction to online genealogy—ships’logs and passport applications and death records and third and fourth and seventh cousins, online family trees of unstable configuration and dubious accuracy, as gnarled as the apricot trunk on which my children had clambered. Lynne was a talented guide to this labyrinthine world. She located census records that placed Julia in New Mexico in 1870, 1880, and 1885 with a rotating cast of children and family: cousins, clerks, servants, a bachelor uncle. She traced the Staab family tree from Germany to the United States and located Zadoc’s descendants in New York; she even tracked Dutch relatives from the other side of my family back to their arrival in New York in the 1660s.
    And Lynne also found the Scotia ’s log, which included a handwritten list of passengers—Julia among them. “There she was,” Lynne wrote in her email, “married name and all.” The ship’s documents were all scanned and posted online; she told me I could see them myself. Which I did, and sure enough, there Julia was, her name scrawled in thick cursive. “Julia Staab,” age twenty-one, hailing from Prussia, the German kingdom into which Lügde had been absorbed in 1807. Listed right above her was a companion—not Abraham, as I’d expected, but rather an “Adolph Staab.” A name I had never heard. A brother? A cousin? “I find it interesting,” Lynne wrote, “that her husband left this duty to someone else.”
    I needed to know who this Adolph was. I went back to my growing sheaf of records on the Staabs—the papers my aunt Betsy had given me and the documents I’d located later in the archives and on the Internet. I dug around in the pile until I found yet another family tree that covered Julia’s and Abraham’s descendants in the United States. This one was created by my great-aunt Lizzie, and at its top sat Julia and a man named Adolph—Julia’s husband, patriarchand progenitor of the rest of the family. Abraham’s