[Dalyia]

When she looked at her mother’s recent research, Brigitte was impressed by the information Marguerite had gathered. She seemed to have the birth and death dates of all her direct ancestors, and many cousins. She knew the counties and parishes in New Orleans where they had lived and died, the names of their homes and plantations, the towns they had migrated to in New York and Connecticut after the Civil War. And she knew the name of the ship one of them had arrived on from Brittany, in 1846. The family seemed to have stayed in the South until just after the Civil War, and then migrated North in the 1860s and 1870s, where they had lived ever since. But what had happened in France before that remained a mystery to her. If anything, Brigitte thought that segment of their history might be more interesting than what her mother knew so far.
“It’s not that long ago, Mom. You ought to be able to get that from the Mormon library too, or a trip to France.”
“I really have to go to Salt Lake to do that. They have more of the European records there and a much larger facility. I just haven’t had time. And libraries that size terrify me. You’re much better at all that than I am.” Her eyes begged Brigitte to help her with the project, and her daughter smiled. Her mother’s enthusiasm touched her heart.
“You know, you have enough here for a book, if you ever want to write one,” Brigitte said encouragingly. She was always impressed by her mother’s diligence and perseverance.
“I don’t think anyone would care about it except our family, and that’s mainly me and you, and a few cousins scattered here and there, unless we still have relatives I don’t know about in France. But I doubt that we do. I’ve found no recent de Margeracs in France. And everyone here has pretty much died out. There’s no one left in the South, and hasn’t been in a hundred years. Your grandfather was born in New York at the turn of the century. There’s really just us now.” It was a labor of love that had fascinated her for years.
“You work so hard on it, Mom,” Brigitte said admiringly.
“I love knowing who we’re related to, where they lived, and what they did there. It’s your legacy too. Maybe one day it will seem more important to you than it does now. There are some very interesting people perched in our family tree,” Marguerite said with a smile, but Brigitte hadn’t found that to be so. They were aristocratic, but there was nothing unusual about them.
In the end, Brigitte spent the rest of the week in New York. She had no pressing reason to go back to Boston. She and her mother went to the theater together, the movies, several small, casual restaurants for dinner, and took long walks in Central Park. They enjoyed each other’s company and her mother tried to stay off painful subjects. There was nothing left to be said about Ted, except that in Marguerite’s opinion Brigitte had wasted six years. And she suspected now that Brigitte thought so too. Ted had proven himself to be totally selfish in the end. Brigitte hadn’t heard from him since his text the morning after they broke up.
On Saturday afternoon they spent a lazy day at home, reading the early edition of the Sunday Times. Her mother chortled when she found an article about genealogies in the magazine section. Predictably, it extolled the virtues of the Mormons and their libraries, and her mother looked at her wistfully again.
“I wish you’d go out to Salt Lake City for me, Brigitte,” she pleaded with her. “You do so much better research than I do. That’s not my forte, but it is yours, and I can’t go any further back now, until I trace the family back to France. I’m pretty much stuck around 1850. Any chance that you’d go there for me?” She didn’t want to add “now that you don’t have a job or a man,” but it was true. Brigitte had time on her hands, and she was feeling restless, while she waited to hear about a job.
She started to say no and then thought about it. There was no reason for her not to go, and from what she’d just read in the Times about the Mormon Family History Library, she had to admit that it sounded interesting, and it was something she could do for her mother, who was always volunteering to do things for her, and was so supportive of her and always had been. It was a small favor she could do for her and Brigitte had nothing else to do now.
“Maybe. I’ll see,” she said noncommittally, not wanting to promise to do it, but she also realized that it was a great way to avoid the book that she was suddenly so disenchanted with. And she thought about it again on Sunday when they were having breakfast in the kitchen and sharing the rest of the Sunday Times. Brigitte was supposed to go back to Boston that afternoon. The weather report said it was snowing there with no end in sight. Two hours later they closed the airport in Boston. The weather was fine in New York; the storm currently in Boston wasn’t due to hit New York until the next day.
“Maybe I could go out to Salt Lake for you for a couple of days,” Brigitte said thoughtfully. “I have a friend from school there, or at least I used to. She has about ten kids and is married to a Mormon. I could look them up and do research for you. It might be fun.” Brigitte smiled at her mother, and Marguerite’s face lit up at the prospect.
“I’d be so grateful if you did. I can’t do another thing until I trace them back through Brittany. The Mormons have incredible records on microfiche and disks, with assistants to help you find it.” She was selling hard, and Brigitte laughed.
“Okay, okay, Mom,” Brigitte answered, and a few minutes later she called the airline and booked a flight to Salt Lake for later that afternoon. It felt good to help her mother, and it was beginning to sound like a more intriguing project. Brigitte was suddenly fascinated to see the Mormon library in Salt Lake, and she wondered if she’d find something there she could use for her book too, although it was unlikely.
Her mother thanked her profusely when she left, and Brigitte promised to call and report her findings. She had booked a reservation at the Carlton Hotel and Suites, which she saw on the Internet was within walking distance of Temple Square where the Family History Library was located. Now that she had agreed to go, Brigitte could hardly wait to see it. She was vastly impressed by what she had seen on the Internet about it. They apparently had hundreds of volunteers to help, and all their records and resources were without charge, except for photocopying documents and photos. It was a remarkable service to the public that they had been providing for decades. The Mormons had a gigantic organization and the most thorough research operation in the world.
Brigitte was thinking about it when she boarded the flight to Salt Lake, and hoped she’d find something of interest to her mother. She didn’t really expect to find anything exceptional in her family history. Everything her mother had come up with so far was both circumspect and benign. They were respectable aristocrats who, for some reason, had chosen to come to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the reign of Napoleon. Perhaps they had come to purchase land, or discover new territories—and they stayed. But Brigitte wondered now too what they had done in France before they’d come to America, what had happened to them during the Napoleonic reign, and the French Revolution fifteen years before that. She was on a mission of discovery now that suddenly seemed a lot more interesting than chronicling women’s rights to vote around the world. Maybe her mother was right after all, and the subject she was researching now was far more worthwhile than what she had been doing for the last seven years. Brigitte was about to find out in Salt Lake.
The flight to Salt Lake City took five and a half hours, and she went straight to the hotel from the airport. It was a European-style inn built in the 1920s, and was a short walk to Temple Square, which was her destination the next day. To orient herself and get some air, she went for a walk before dinner. She found Temple Square easily, a few blocks away, and immediately spotted the enormous Family History Library on the west side of the square, on the same side as the history museum of the Church, and Osmyn Deuel’s cabin, which had been preserved since 1847 and was the oldest in the city. She walked past the Mormon Temple with its impressive six spires, and the domed Tabernacle next to it, which was open to the public for rehearsals and concerts of the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Both structures were impressive to see, even from the outside. She saw the capitol, and walked past the Beehive House and the Lion House, both built in the mid-1850s, which had been the official residences of Brigham Young, who had been the president of the Church and the first governor of Utah.