The canvas was an old army duffel, rolled tight and tied with twine. Inside it was another roll of canvas, a big one, maybe four feet by three. When I unrolled it on the hearth, I had to sit back on my heels.
It was a family tree. Hand painted. Every branch drawn in brown ink, every leaf a name, in careful old fashioned lettering. At the roots it said, Johann and Maria Stauffer, came from Bavaria 1847. At the top, the last names were from 1962.
There were over two hundred names on that tree.
Rolled inside it were photographs. Tintypes. Wedding pictures. Babies in christening gowns. Soldiers from three different wars. On the back of each one, somebody had written who it was and which leaf they belonged to.
The couple who hired me, Tom and Diane, came in from the kitchen. Diane knelt down next to me and did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, who hides a whole family in a fireplace?
Somebody had put a hundred and fifteen years of their people in the one spot in the house that would never burn.
Diane took it to the county historical society in Coshocton the next day. The director, a man named Paul, knew the name right away. The Stauffers had farmed the land north of town for four generations. The last Stauffer to live in the house was a widow named Clara. She died in 1987 with no children. The house went to a cousin who sold it.
Paul thought the tree was painted by Clara herself. She had been an art teacher. He had a sample of her handwriting on a school record. It matched.
He guessed she hid it in the fireplace because she was the last one, and she did not know who would care. So she put it somewhere it would wait.
Paul wrote a small story for the local paper. He asked if anyone was related to the Stauffers.
Forty three people answered. They lived in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, one in Germany. Some had heard about Clara. Most had never known where their great grandparents came from.
The historical society held a reunion that October, in the fellowship hall of the Lutheran church the Stauffers had helped build. They hung the family tree on the wall. People stood in front of it for hours, finding their own grandparents on the branches, taking pictures, crying, calling cousins they had never met.
Diane and Tom went too. They were not related. They did not care. They brought a sheet cake.
At the end of the night, the oldest Stauffer there, a retired farmer from Indiana named Walt, stood up with a marker. He asked permission. Then he added a new branch to the top of the tree for the first time since 1962. His grandchildren. Twelve new names.
Twenty four years building hearths. That is the only fireplace I ever found warmer inside than out.