March 1, 1979
To:
Those generations that follow.
From:
Merle Cliff Keepers and Henry Lloyd Keepers.
Subject: Continuance of the Keepers family history.
We have given our best efforts to leave behind a history of the American Keepers family.
A
complete historical record could not be captured from the unchronicled past in
the short time we had between business retirement and the time we must set this
task aside.
Until
every scrap of information now extant, the national, state and county records,
together with church, old bibles, newspaper morgues and cemetery records have
been reviewed and catalogued, this work will remain unfinished.
It
is suggested that those in their competitive years do not undertake serious
pursuit of this study. You cannot serve two masters, that is, your pursuit of
monetary gain and the Keepers genealogy. But you can, in your spare time, gain
information on methodology and chart your course for later, then delve
seriously into the study and leave your writings to posterity.
Imagine
a young Keepers family member in 2673 delightedly tracing a thousand years of
the American Keepers family. Too grandiose, too far distant? Well, almost one
third of that millennium has already joined the ages!
We hope someone in each generation will
take up this work.
When
you have become engrossed, your dreams and fantasies will transport you to
strange places and you will pursue an elusive bit of evidence with a tenacity
you may not know you possess.
In
your search you may find a weathered headstone in an old abandoned and weed
grown cemetery. It bears the almost obliterated name of Keepers. You find no
reference in your data. You will sit down to rest and ponder for a
moment. In the quietude of the place you may, in reverie, imagine a gentle
susurrus as those resting there murmur softly to each other in the great
camaraderie of the grave. Listen! Has one a familiar timbre?
In
your travels you locate a farm once owned by a family member. This was early
eighteenth century and your data is silent concerning him. Nothing on his
antecedents or descendants, nothing on his life or death. Nothing at all except the land ownership
record. Now you sit amid the pine-reclaimed fields and listen to the
velvety soughing of the wind in the trees. You listen and wish that wind a voice
to tell of the life and death of this man.
You
may someday stand in a desert valley and wonder how many of our family
lie buried in nameless and forgotten graves along the pioneer
trails. Nameless and forgotten? Again
you listen but hear nothing save the keening wind among the bleached and heaped
up tumbleweed skeletons.
No, you will not hear those voices from
the past. But you will have gained enigmas and be thereafter haunted!
Now you will surely continue our
search!
Do
not wait overlong to query the elders of your time lest the information you
seek become frozen in profound silence. All, each in our turn and at our
appointed time, must march dutifully into the awesome silence of eternity. From
there you, then living, will hear no more!
Our blessings on all generations that
follow.
Henry
Lloyd Keepers 1116 Winfield Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45205
Merle
Cliff Keepers 2174-P Via Mariposa East, Laguna Hills, California 92653