History’s a natural for this local family

COSTA MESA ? In the days before disposable ballpoint pens, when everyone seems to have written with studied and exquisite care, Tim Wagner’s great-great-grandfather sent a letter to his girlfriend proposing marriage.

But he had some misgivings.

“How can I love an afflicted woman that has no great deal of property and is so near my own age?” William Andrew Garner wrote in 1857. “I myself am poor, have no dependence save that of my own exertions, and what can I do with such a wife? How can I love her?

“My own heart and reason answers: I love her because she is a high-minded, intelligent, affectionate and industrious woman, and pretty enough for any man.”

Wagner, a Costa Mesa resident with a thirst for genealogy, knows the whole story and many more. The letter is one of his favorite pieces in a collection that includes an estimated 2,000 documents ? marriage proposals, news clippings, teaching certificates and even an 1893 deed for a cemetery plot that cost $5 ? and more than 600 photographs, including a few tintypes.

But perhaps Wagner’s masterwork is the three-foot scrapbook that he chose because it’s big enough to hold gravestone rubbings.

After Garner moved west from South Carolina, the family mainly lived in Arkansas, where Wagner was born in 1948.

Some of the family tombstones there were so worn they couldn’t be made out in a photograph. So Wagner, who works as an accountant, and his sister broke out the chalk and produced clearly readable images.

The collection, like Wagner’s interest in genealogy, is something of a hand-me-down. His aunt started collecting family papers 75 years ago and used them to write a book about her mother, Wagner’s grandmother.

“Fortunately, they had two great-aunts who were still alive,” Wagner said. “These women kept everything.”

Wagner bought some genealogy software and plugged in his aunt’s research. In 2000 he decided to reedit her book. After his aunt died, a cousin asked if he wanted her research materials, and his collection began.

“It’s just something that’s taken over and it’s sort of like an addiction,” he said.

Once he started piecing their lives together, Wagner’s relatives took on a new dimension for him.

“They weren’t names and dates and places anymore ? they were real people. They actually lived,” he said.

Wagner’s collection is unusual because most families don’t have so many relics, said Caroline Rober, president of the Southern California Chapter of the Assn. of Professional Genealogists.

“Most of us, for that kind of stuff, we get a little but we have to search forever to find it be- cause it’s scattered everywhere.”

Rober and Wagner will be among the volunteers at the genealogy booth at the Orange County Fair, which began Friday and ends July 30. Rober said about half the people who come to the booth know little or noth- ing about their family history, but others are avid researchers who “come back year after year to show us what they have done throughout the year.”

Sometimes people unearth mysteries. Wagner doesn’t know for certain who put a memorial verse in the newspaper for his great-great uncle who was killed in the Civil War in 1864.

But he has a pet theory based on the initials printed under the verse: JWB. Wagner believes his relative, before his death, may have befriended Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

“I have no way of proving it, but I just know no one in the family has those initials,” he said.

Uncovering the past and making it presentable ? Wagner copies documents, transcribes the sometimes spidery or faint handwriting in letters, and stores everything in plastic sleeves ? can turn into the job of a lifetime.

Displaying a box that holds a foot-high stack of documents he has yet to explore, Wagner said, “I have years more work to do.”

As for William Andrew Garner and his “afflicted” girlfriend, the proposal letter worked and they married ? though Wagner has never learned what her affliction was.