One story

You need to start somewhere.  Why not with Adam?

There's only one picture of my great-great-great-grandfather Adam Huffman, a slim and handsome man with a tidy moustache.  And there's only one story about him: the story of how he died so young,

They say he died of cancer.  And back at the turn of the century, cancer was a word spoken in whispers, a disease too terrible to think about, something to be treated like leprosy, or the plague.  Who knew how you could catch it?  So when he was sick, he lived in a hut behind his family's house in what we now call Saskatchewan, Canada.  A diseased man, dying alone, his wife took him meals three times a day - and aside from that, he saw no one.  And then he was dead.  And since then, in every generation, the youngest of each family's children has been struck with cancer before their time.  Many of them, like him, died before they ever saw their grandchildren.  It's a toxic inheritance and even now -

But no.  That's not right.  It wasn't cancer that he died of.  That's something they said to keep face.  It was the alcohol.  He was uncommonly sensitive to alcohol.  Allergic to it, they think.  And he had a little too much alcohol and it poisoned him -

But no, that's not right.  He wasn't allergic.  That's something they said to keep face.  He was an alcoholic, through and through, and he drank himself to death.  And left her, just like that, with two kids to raise.  And ever since then the Huffman children have had this weakness, just like he did - they've taken a little strong to the drink.  But Minerva Huffman, who was Adam's wife, she made her son Harry promise her he wouldn't drink, because of how his father had gone.  She made him promise it before she'd let him have the land she'd homesteaded.  And he promised, and since then he never drank.  Oh, he'd  have a drink, but that was it - he never drank like his father did, who drank himself to -

But no, that's not right.  It wasn't drinking that Harry promised to swear off.  It was the gambling.  So maybe it was the cancer that killed his father after all.  See, at 17 Harry was already a gambler, and his mother sensed trouble.  So she made him promise to stop gambling, and he promised, but he didn't stop - just traveled farther away to do it.  He stopped gambling in Montana, went all the way to Minneapolis for the sake of his mother's peace of mind.  And then when he saved his sister's farm with his poker winnings, she gave up fighting, and let him gamble closer to home -

But no, that's not right.  Harry'd always gambled in town.  He dealt cards in Plentywood, he got into scrapes in Dooley. So he couldn't have promised his mother he wouldn't gamble, because he never stopped at all - and nobody's called Harry a liar.  And he rarely lost, either, so why would she complain in the first place?  So it must have been the drinking he swore off, because it's true he never was a drunk.  And so it must have been his father was a drinker.  Unless -

Oh, who's to say.  Great-great-great-great-grandpa Huffman died youn.  Maybe of cancer.  Maybe of the drink.

Nobody knows for sure.

End of story?