He was an alcoholic, as were so many of his Army friends, and at my birth she felt afraid for the care my brother and I would receive should she ever become too ill to care for us herself. When father suggested she return to her parents' home for a short time since his next Army posting was still uncertain -- the second World War was beginning to wind down -- she made a decision to leave for good.

Mother said that on the train platform father began to realize that something was wrong and begged her not to go, but she felt that some point of decision had been passed and so we boarded the train. He never knew as he watched the train pull away that we would never come back.

Learning that my high school search for my father had been fruitless (he had died years before), had ended my attempts to find out who he really was. I had nothing to hold in my hand as a talisman to make him stand before me. His poetry, his medals -- all were gone, packed up and sent away long before I could protest their loss.

Other threads were the names and places of two of her marriages, to Bell in Canon City and to Van Deusen in Denver. The obituary also noted the name of the great-grandfather whose wife, I later learned, raised Catharine -- Henry B. Gibson.

That short notice started me on a quest that has led me to Canandaigua, New York and through labyrinth pathways across the Internet. At the time I first put up this website, I had not yet found my father's poetry, but I had been able to discover much that helped me make sense of who he was and what he passed down to me.

Outcast men of the world are we, Sunk in the depths of iniquity Detested by all and loved by none. A blot on the face of the kindly sun. Men of training and breeding and birth Who knew full well what the game was worth Who played their hands -- and lost -- -- and then Lost themselves from the world of men. We hid ourselves in the Island world Where the flashing coils of the "Snake" are curled We sought the depths to hide our shame. The "thing" we had made of an honored name. We swam the Bay in the early dawn But the Shark came not, and we lived on. We sought the end in the bolo's steel But hearts wounds live, while flesh wounds heal. We went unarmed to the Moro's "jil" But they called us "mad" and they would not kill. And the Padre came with his tale of Grace But we knew better, and laughed in his face. We twined our hearts in a woman's hair Then tried to forget in the din and glare Of a "tienda down on the opal bay Where many men come and some men stay. We lost ourselves in the Army then, Our identity merely "Enlisted Men" But in the dusk, when the shadows start to crawl In their weird, wild dance on the barracks wall A ghastly pageant that comes to stir Our memory again to what we were And we bow our heads and stifle a cry For we don't know how and we'll never know why. El Tigre. Nov 7, 1928

Father's name at birth was Bradley Evans Bell. When his mother married Robert M. Van Deusen (born abt. 1868 in NY), Bradley used his stepfather's name informally until, as an adult, he legally changed his name to Bradley TenEyck Van Deusen. He was born in 1905 and, at the age of 16, ran away to join the Army. Both of those acts make so much more sense when looked at in the context of his background.

Catharine's father was Brigadier-General Henry Lawrence Burnett, a Civil War army lawyer who served as assistant special judge advocate for the Lincoln assassination trial. Her father's father, Brig.Gen. Henry Livingston Lansing, commanded a National Guard unit in Buffalo, and her granduncle, Colonel Henry Seymour Lansing, later another Brigadier-General, commanded the 17th New York Infantry. And ninety years before that, there were Lansings in the Revolutionary War as well. Bradley's family was a military family and he was pointed to an Army career from his youngest days.

Father was not the first of his line to leave home at so early an age. Both his grandfather Burnett and his 2nd great grandfather Gibson had run away from home to follow their own dreams rather than the dreams of their parents. General Burnett, the son of a farmer, ran away to gain an education in the law. Henry Gibson ran away from his father, a lawyer, to learn business in the store of Judge Cooper, the father of James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Gibson's lifelong friend.

Creating with words was a family tradition. My many times married grandmother Catharine and my grandfather, her middle husband, Jack Bell, published the Canon City Cannon, a paper that "went off once a week." Grandfather also published mining articles, as he had won and lost fortunes from Alaska to Central America. Grandmother was known to write children's stories, but I've been unable to find them under any of her names.

• Catharine Gibson Burnett
• Catharine Burnett Mercur
• Catharine Burnett Bell
• Catharine Burnett Van Deusen

Going back further, writing and reading seem to have been lifelong family loves. Catharine's maternal grandfather was widely praised for his Besides Catharine and Jack, Catharine's grandfather, Henry Livingston Lansing, was renowned as a literary correspondent and one of the most famous documents, the Declaration of Independence, was created by a committee including Catharine's great...n granduncle, though Robert Livingston was recalled by New York before he could sign the document.

I know that father and mother lived in Greenwich Village for most of the ten years of their marriage. Father was part of the literary set of the time. I know he valued his relationship with Red Grange, a football player. I know that the wall behind mother and father's sofa was marked by the hair cream of John Rose Gildea, a journalist and poet from Arizona. And I must assume that these, and others, were recipients of father's books.

But what happened to those books has been lost in the fog of time.

He must have left copies of his books with his family -- his mother, his half-sister, his niece. But along with those medals and long-ago books, mother also sent back his family and so I know nothing of anyone once close to him.

Suggestions of possible paths for me to follow are gratefully accepted.