As we age, our older generation begins to disappear. If you are lucky to live to your 80s, all of that older generation of parents, teachers, ministers, and senior friends are no longer around to answer your questions. This is especially true of those that you cannot look up in a book or, like today, online.

This occurred to me as I wondered about my ancestors some years ago. Ancestry.com gives us a lot of answers about names going back centuries, but not personal things. Knowing that, I tried to get as many answers as I could before I lost that parent. In my father’s case, it ended far too soon, but my mother, the writer and editor took advantage. In the 1970s, my parents bought a motor home and drove from San Diego each winter to the beaches of Cabo San Lucas. My father fished and my mother wrote. She compiled a book for each of her children with dates, and even photographs when possible, going back at least three or four generations of my parents. That book has been invaluable.

Later, after my father’s death, I convinced my mom to sit down with me and my video camera to have a talk about history. At first, she was a bit hesitant about that intruding camera, but she gave me almost two hours of personal history of my parents. Some I knew and some came out a complete surprise. I asked her how she and dad had met. They were both freshmen at Northwestern, but the answer blew me away. At a dance in downtown Chicago, my mother had come with some other friends and was dancing with one of the boys when my father cut in on him! And the rest is history.

What was even more difficult to find out after their deaths was a simple but curious question I had. In tracing some Marek history, I read that my grandparents were married in Montague, Michigan. What? Montague was a totally Catholic community then, and my grandmother’s father had left the church and became Irish Orange – pure Protestant. Montague sit right across the White River from Whitehall, a totally Protestant town at that time. How do I find that answer?

If you might remember, I had an uncle who was missile engineer of the first satellite the USA launched into space. In 2014, I was visiting this 99-year-old man in an assisted living facility in Bradenton, Florida. Who else might know that rather strange marriage location? So, I asked.

“That’s quite easy, nephew. They were married on great-grandma’s farm, which was in Montague County but outside the village. They invited a minister from Whitehall to perform that ceremony.” Answer done. But he went on. “Did you know President Eisenhower visited me again last week?” he asked. I looked at the caregiver and he just smiled. Yes, after the first successful launch of an American satellite in 1958, Ike had come to Cape Canaveral to congratulate the launch team. Not again in 2014. So, I want to believe the first, and we’ll just let the second part slide away.

The thing that brought up the problem of no one left to ask came up last week when I was reading my favorite weekly newspaper, the Clifton Advocate. The editor, Therese Simoneau, has developed a tradition of reprinting a front page of a prior edition of the newspaper as one of the pages with the same month and day from years ago. This last one was the front page of the issue printed Sept. 18, 1952. I moved to Clifton in March 1951, so I was around.

One of the articles concerned losing Clifton’s only doctor to the military. Dr. Henry C. Andrews, 46, owner and manager of Central Hospital in Clifton, had passed his physical examination for military service. He and his wife had put the hospital into operation the year before! Now this had to not have happened.

In Clifton in 1951, you had a phone with strange numbers. If you had 214R2, then you were one of several people who had that line and if your phone rang twice, it was for you. If once, then not. Mildred, the operator, made all the connections with her cables sitting upstairs in a Clifton building. Everyone knew Mildred, and she knew everyone. Our line was private as the number was 89.

Back to Dr. Andrews. He treated me many times after 1952, including stitches, a cast on my foot, and some illnesses from time to time well into the middle to late 1950s.

My mother still laughed at one such episode. Mom picked up the phone and Mildred answered, and my mom asked if she knew if Dr. Andrews was in the hospital. Mildred replied, “He is at the Smith farm but should be back in about half an hour. What did Dennis do this time?” I guess my history of fighting with barbed wire had local history.

Now who do I ask about what happened with Dr. Andrews and the military? He was 46 years old, quite a bit late for joining the Army. But then again, it coincided with the Korean War that the U.S. had joined the summer before. I do not know who might have the rest of that story.

So, if you are lucky enough to have some older relatives or friends, the time to inquire is now. Death and memory loss work at losing so much history that might not be important to the world, but it might be to you. If anyone does know the Dr. Andrews story. I would love to hear it.

· Dennis Marek can be contacted at llamalaw23@gmail.com.