George Burpee Burnett
The ancestral acquaintance is connected to Henry Josiah DeForest about whom I received today a quite unexpected email highlighting the continuing interest I and others have in our past. I was especially intrigued to learn that DeForest was a Freemason. He may have been instrumental in championing my paternal grandfather's interest in the Craft (an association which escaped my own father). It was while sporting my grandfather's gold watch and chain (from which hung a fob of the well known symbols of Freemasonry - the square and compass) that I was unwittingly first identified as a relative of a member of the Lodge.
Freemasonry - DeForest
This latest intelligence is on the heels of our recent serendipitous meeting with the new owners (Coral Shuai and Hao Hua) of my paternal grandfather's former house in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
It will remain to the effort of others than myself to detail the ancestral lineage. Oddly as much as I am addicted to detail it is an obsession which is confined to the narrow limits of my particular focus, one which does not include genealogy. For the instant I satisfy myself to absorb only the more general information, a motive as vast as the open sky but nonetheless as compelling as a clear day at sea.
Meanwhile late this afternoon on a far more mundane plane we visited the construction site of our burial monument at the Auld Kirk Cemetery. What strange satisfaction arises from this anticipatory rendition of death! The subterranean excavation appears now to be complete, awaiting the arrival and installation of the stone base and the monument. I noted with some contentment that many of the tombstones surrounding our plot are those of former clients. This at least strengthens what is otherwise a general lack of alliance with anywhere else in the world, a product of my historically nomadic existence.
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