Sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot

Not really. Not me, at least.

But Uncle Joe's post "That's Life!: A Musical Journey Part 1" reminded me of something that's hiding in the back of my office closet: an old violin that had been in my mom's family for many years. Grandpa always claimed it had been built by one of our relatives, and about the time I started college, he started trotting it out and talking about passing it down to me.

I resisted. Grandpa had already given me his pocket watch, and I didn't want to be the sole caretaker of his treasures. Besides, the old fiddle just seemed like such a fragile, useless thing. I was at a stage in my life where I had just moved in to my first apartment—my small apartment. Where would I store it? What if it got broken?

It wasn't that I couldn't appreciate the history of the thing. I was afraid of it.

A couple Christmases ago, I was visiting my parents when Mom brought it up again. Grandpa had been gone nearly a decade, by then.

"You know," she said, "you ought to take that violin back to Texas with you. Your grandpa really wanted you to have it."

Sweetie shot me her honor-thy-mother look, and I bit back the usual objections about not having enough room in a car full of Christmas gifts, luggage, and us.

"Okay, let's have a look at it."

Mom brought out the battered, hand-hewn case, set it on the dining room table, and fiddled with the latch. She opened the lid. The interior of the case was lined in worn red felt and constructed to accomodate the shape of the violin. The violin itself was protected by a drawstring bag made of soft, red cloth with a pattern that reminded me of mattress ticking.

I lifted it out of the case, undid the drawstring, and carefully slid the bag off the violin. The strings were all slack and broken, and the bridges were out. The bowstring was long gone from the bow. The fingerboard showed some natural wear, but oh man—there wasn't a nick or a scratch or a crack anywhere on the body or neck.

"Wow," I said.

Mom smiled. "Do you remember the story behind this?"

"Sort of. Wasn't this supposed to have been made by one of Grandpa's cousins?"

"I think so," she said. "Or maybe one of his uncles. Maybe you could find him in your genealogy research."

"Maybe," I said, turning the violin this way and that, admiring it.

Then I caught sight of something through one of the f-holes.

"Hey, I see something inside. Have you got a flashlight handy?"

She came up with one, and I used it to peer inside the f-holes. There was a thin, yellowed strip of paper stuck to the inside of the body. On it, in delicate script, had been written "Charles Creque violin maker Suffield O 1903".

Charles, it turned out, was my grandfather's first cousin, once removed—or his father's first cousin, to look at it another way. Charles, born in 1866, was the youngest son of Anthony Creque and Mary Scholastica Farnbach, both French immigrants. At various times in his life, he worked as a carpenter, a farmer, and a laborer doing odd jobs. He died in 1942.

Sitting at Dad's computer, looking through the information in our research database, I could almost feel the violin trying to bridge the gap between its maker and me. I could see that Charles had never married. Census records showed that he and several of his siblings lived with their mother (Anthony died in 1898) well into their adulthood.

A carpenter/farmer who made beautiful violins. I have trouble imagining how Charles came to acquire his skills, but maybe—without a wife and children to support—it was his hobby. Maybe one day I'll uncover the answer.