Meet the curator

Thanks for coming by. My name is Brian Harrison Bragg. I was born in Marion, Indiana, before anyone imagined such a thing as a Baby Boom. It was as good a time as any to be born, and as good a place — not that I had a choice. Marion was a manufacturing and agricultural city of 25,000, the county seat of Grant County, about 60 miles northeast of the state capital. Marion was not a cosmopolitan city by any stretch, but it was about as diverse and interesting a place as you were going to find in the conservative midwestern flatlands in the late 1930s.

The Great Depression was nearly over. My parents had waited eight years to bring me into this world while they both worked at blue-collar jobs to help support their siblings and extended family through hard times. The coming war in Europe was still more than a year off when I arrived. My demographic cohort bellied up to the trough before the great demanding mob with loud voices and sharp elbows began arriving in 1946 to stir such change and outright disruption — some bad, some good — in American life. (That's you Boomers I'm describing, in case you didn't recognize what you did.)

I didn't think about such things until much later, of course, as I analyzed what influences the times and places surely had on my development, my character and my outlook. You tend to dwell on such things when you research your family's history and involve yourself in genealogy.

Until she arrived in 1945 my sister, Brenda, granted me more than seven years to be the only child, indulged by working parents and a grandmother who was as near to being Christian as anyone I have encountered in the many decades since.

The trolley line (we called them streetcars) ran past my front door, and for a nickel I rode it it to the other end of town, seven miles, to the big swimming pool at the city park. I began solo trips when I was nine. A kid could do that in those days, and nobody worried.

Four railroads ran through Marion — the Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Nickel Plate and the New York Central. We lived one long block from a NYC switching spur, and I spent hours clambering around the boxcars, coal cars and gondolas. I got rides on the locomotive when the train crew was in a good mood and the bosses weren't looking. The brakemen rode my bike alongside while I perched up in that old 2-4-0 Baldwin amid the cinders and the steam and the grease.

I never knew there were kids growing up in places with no tracks and no freight cars. I wouldn't have cared then; now, I'm sad for them.

I also never knew there were kids growing up without carloads of aunts and uncles to serve as surrogate parents for an afternoon or a weekend or just anytime I chose to walk in. At one time I had 20 aunts and uncles all living within 15 miles of my house.

I'm sure my core interest in family history was born out of the stories from my relatives, tales of the olden days and the personalities and characters of the storytellers themselves. Some of the tales were inspiring, some were shocking, some were merely documentaries of social, political and economic conditions of times past.

The times were changing fast in Middle America in the mid-20th Century, just as times are changing fast today in so many parts of the world. I believe by studying and reflecting upon our family history and our social roots, understanding how we were shaped by them and taking lessons from that understanding, we can gain the knowledge to make this a better place.