The Posterity: Unascertained

Two registers side by side, the Crown’s as it ordered it kept in 1789 and 1796, with the clerk’s heading and one ghost name never sworn and nothing beneath, stamped with no entry for the class from 1796 to 2026, and the Nation’s, filling line by line with sworn members, the same name first, each with the village of its Loyalist ancestor and a Record Code; you with the generations of your line drawn as people running to a founder marked UE, the magistrate beside the oath, the same office in 1796 and today; a hundred people on the Grand River, Mohawk and the other five nations, nearly all of Loyalist descent, beside a hundred in Brantford, few of them Six Nations; two marks on one line, the three villages for a Mohawk and the Mark of Honour for the rest; the duty dated along a strip; you with the pegs of your line running to a founder of the three villages, the class defined, and the test stated, the village, since on the Grand River almost everyone descends from Loyalists and whether a line runs to the three villages is for each to find, peg by peg; the oath of 1796 and what became of it, Dorchester’s Order, Simcoe’s Proclamation in its own words, what it required, the missing link, and what the Nation asks by Gazette No. 63; how the Register ascertains a line today in six pegs, and what the line gives and who keeps it. The web edition tells the line’s story, a desk with a computer where the paper grows poof by poof as the pegs appear, the Loyalist Mohawk waving back, the coronet thrown to your hand with the mark UE at your side, and the desk giving way to the magistrate beside you; fills the Nation’s page line by line, has one more of the hundred on the Grand River find out every few seconds and wave, and answers a tap on any plum figure with a puff of smoke: most find a line and turn gold, waving; some find none and shrug, both arms out; a tap on one who knows pops a heart; a third of them puff hearts instead and go the extra mile; a tap on a shrugger brings hearts and another way for half of them, while the rest walk away from it, as some do.