What I Inherited from My Criminal Great-Grandparents

Jessica Winter’s impulsive search on a genealogy website turns up a century-old record of her grandfather, identified as a six-year-old “inmate” of a Pennsylvania orphanage, a situation brought about by his parents’ counterfeiting crimes. The discovery sparks recognition: Winter, who has no memory of this part of her family history, spots threads of her grandfather’s life in her own previously published novel. As she expands her search, the threads multiply, running throughout her family. “I came to believe that I was, in some respects, my great-grandmother’s protégée, or her doppelgänger,” she writes. “Or her counterfeit.” Winter’s account of her great-grandfather, the convicted counterfeiter Anton, is wholly engrossing. But her exploration of the ways in which we accumulate trauma—ways that might confound our memory—grants this essay a fascinating heart.

I knew that my grandfather had been in an orphanage—didn’t I? Was I learning about this only now, or was I remembering it? How had I not known I knew this?

The discovery triggered a kind of synaptic flooding, a wave of memory overwhelming its conscious embankment. Or so it felt. Maybe my limbic system was relaying intense sympathy for my grandfather’s plight, nothing more. Maybe I was simply taken aback by a remarkable coincidence, just as one might jump at a door slamming shut, when it’s only the wind.

I used to have the common dream where you find a secret room in your house. In my version of the dream, I would also find a child in the room, hungry and dishevelled, staring back at me in stoic accusation. I had this dream so often that I gave it to the mother in my novel, so that she could invest it with meaning. Finding my grandfather in the census was as if someone had woken me up and handed me the dream child’s birth certificate.