What did I inherit from my great-grandparents in crime

“Because there is no money in winter,” Democrats and Chronicles “He had to serve every dollar fine every day, so his sentence was actually twenty years.” The harsh punishment echoed the Secret Service’s harsh view of forgery. “There isn’t a lot of sense of proportion,” Mihm said. “These agents internalize the belief that money itself is sacred and that forgery is an insult to the majesty of the state.”

Selma also pleaded guilty, but her verdict was suspended due to her son’s identity. After release, she went to Rochester to retrieve the Earl from the children’s shelter and then went to her parents’ home in Erie to reunite with her other boys. But she did not give up on her husband. Later in 1907, Selma wrote to James Finch, a US pardon attorney, in pursuit of Anton’s verdict. “I was in so much pain without him,” she wrote. She was undergoing laundry and cleaning work, but, she told Finch that she “can’t make enough money to take care of my children properly.” She continued: “To raise the good Christian citizen the father wanted, I believe he will be a better person to what happened to him.”

The return address of the Selma letter is not Brandts. She didn’t last long under her parents’ roof. During most of Anton’s incarceration, Selma apparently lived alone without a boy in a rented room.

Until recently, I knew nothing about Anton and Selma Winter, I knew nothing about their son Earl, who died when I was twelve. My dad had a tense relationship with his parents and we didn’t spend much time with his family. One night last summer, I was delaying an article about genealogical website research while writing an article, and on a whim, I started slamming my grandparents’ names into the search bar.

One of the first items I found that night – that drew me into the newspaper archives of the Progressive Age and the endless feed of the Secret Service ledger – was my grandfather’s entry in the 1910 U.S. census. There I found that the Count was listed as a “six-year-old prisoner” and was a friendless house. That was the orphanage in Yili. It was impossible for Charles Dickens himself to come up with a more thoughtful name. I stayed on my laptop until three o’clock that morning, ransacked every digital filing cabinet I could find, trying to figure out how the Count lost his family and caused it in such a place.

This fixation is at least in part because I already possess some unconscious knowledge of the fate of the Count, as the documents I have been searching for have been hidden in the spider-web crawling space of my mind. A few years ago, I wrote a novel about a mother who adopted the youngest of four children from an orphanage. She, like me, is an avid reader of British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, whose work on the relationship between mother and child has contributed to what we now call the development of attachment theory. To study this book, I immerse myself in the literature on neglecting children, attachment disruption, and institutional childcare. I often wonder why I am attracted by these cruel and abandoned desolate stories.

While I was still writing the first draft of the book, in late spring 2018, the Trump administration widely implemented its family separation policy on the U.S.-Mexico border, under which thousands of children were forcibly taken from their parents. During the weeks when crisis dominates news, my fight or flight responses are constantly activated, embarrassing me. I’m very beating, irritable, and crying easily. Besides families on the border, I also thought of it. I dreamed of them. These invasive thoughts make me feel narcissistic delusions, like I have lost the ability to distinguish between what happened thousands of miles away and what happened to me. My kids were one and three years old at the time and I had to sleep in their room at night or I wouldn’t have been sleeping at all.

One might argue that I responded normally to the ongoing human rights atrocities of my own government. And I may have been hormonal because my baby has recently completed breastfeeding. But, a few years later, when I discovered the Earl in an orphanage, another possibility emerged: in all the horrible news stories that make headlines around the world every day, I was undone by this story – the child was taken away from the parents – because it caused some thrill in my mind.

When I click to enlarge the Count’s census entry, the recognition is instant and intrinsic, which is a shocking relief. My hands became cold and numb. The high electrical frequency on my ears is imminent. Novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote a century ago, describing a similar moment: “To be totally sure, it seemed to paralyze her understanding, like a snake bite in her brain.” I know my grandfather used to be in an orphanage–didn’t it? Am I only knowing this now, or do I remember it? Why don’t I know this?

The discovery triggered a synaptic flood, a wave of memory flooding its conscious embankment. Probably felt it. Maybe my edge system expressed strong sympathy for my grandfather’s plight, and that’s all. Maybe I was just shocked by a great coincidence, like when a person might hit a door, it was just the wind.

I used to have a shared dream where you can find a secret room in the house. In my Dreams, I would also find a child in the room, hungry and disheveled, staring at me with stoic accusations. I often have this dream that I handed it over to my mother in the novel so that she could invest meaningfully. It seems that someone has woken me up and handed me the birth certificate of my dream child.

During the years when Anton was in prison and Selma was in poverty, their sons Arthur and Hugo were nowhere to be found in any archive I searched for. In the 1910 census, the Count was listed as a friendless home, the nine-year-old hero, who lived with another family on a farm outside of Erie, probably offered manual labor in exchange for rooms and boards – a shared arrangement for orphan children at the time, often promoted by the Children’s Aid Association.

Selma’s request on behalf of Anton finally arrived at her Congressman Arthur Bates, who petitioned the U.S. Attorney General in a letter: “My friends at Erie wrote me about the punishment for his wife and four children, which was harder than he himself for his wife and four children.” Daily time “Mrs. Winter is in poor health, and the children need a father to take care of them, and others fear that they will become public charges,” the report said. Anton wrote to William H. He concluded, “I hope the fate of my children will tempt your Lord to let mercy take my place, and in my case, I, most respect you, Anton Winter.”

President Taft commuted to Anton’s verdict and deleted his fine in March 1910. Despite the strong opposition of Agent Gammon, the pardon passed what he revealed to Finch, who “discovered the glass negatives and obscene photos he had copied, which was a very obscene nature.” Erie County District Attorney Wesley Dudley also raised more objections. “My opinion is that winter is a close-up well done, and his detention is not what she seems to believe in Mrs. Winter’s loss.”

Anton clearly proved Dudley was right. After he was released from the Atlanta prison, his discharge documents indicate he left with a pen, a watch, a piece of “miscellaneous garbage” and a suitcase. He never reappeared in the Erie City Directory, and Selma began calling himself a widow a few years later. He may never see his wife or son again.

As I continued to study my family, I saw more and more similarities between the lives of my ancestors and my own. I began to believe that in some ways, I was a great-grandmother’s protégé or her Doppelgänger. Or her forgery. For example: She married a man who showed fearsome instability and terrifyingness to his money. So did I, she “constantly lives, worried about some kind of violence.” So did me until I left. (In 2020, my husband was charged with assault. The case was eventually dismissed and he denied any violence during our marriage.) I often felt the needle prick of déjàvu when completing the winter case file: the exact phrase twist, which is a ridiculous specific expense. Too much rhyme. Maybe my terrible marriage is just a generational habit, imprint, groove, laid a hundred and twenty years ago by a lonely, ignorant woman I never knew a hundred and twenty years ago. Maybe I’m reading other people’s lines, writing novels about another woman’s real child.

No one of the Count’s generation knew Anton. My father is now eighty-eight years old and told me that when he grew up he was vaguely aware of his grandfather’s crimes in Germany. I remember he said the word “horse thief” was overwhelming his mind. But my father doesn’t remember hearing about the actual suffering of Anton and Selma, and he didn’t know (at least unconsciously) that his father was separated from his parents and siblings in the institution as a child. He said he and the Count never talked too much.

Jill Salberg, who teaches in a postdoctoral program in Psychological Analysis at NYU, told me that stories about family trauma are usually not conveyed directly to children, but are passing and half forgotten or heard half. Information is placed somewhere in our unconscious mind. Salberg wrote in a 2015 article that children have something to say, “before there is something to say, and before narrative, they absorb the history of their parents.” Psychological analyst Galit Atlas wrote in her 2022 book Emotional Inheritance that Noah wrote a Noah who imagined that he had a missing twin brother since he was a child. As an adult, he learned that he had an older brother, also known as Noah, who died of a baby. Another patient, a gay man, has repeated dreams of an ex-boyfriend who eventually unlocks the mystery of his grandfather’s death, which he never knew, and his wife committed suicide after discovering that he had an incident with other men.

In Salberg and others’ work, this attachment that Earl suffered during childhood was the core harm of intergenerational ghosts. Like other forms of toxic stress, sudden parental loss can have a profound impact on early brain development. Tearing apart by his family must have shaped the Earl, and the disaster also seems to mark how he raises his children and how they raise them.