Goodbye Monkey Mountain Michael P. Williams (bio) My great-aunt Mary Anne was among the closest of distant relatives, a person met once and then twice removed, first from social occasions, and then from the active family conversation. She was in King Kong, my family had told me on the few occasions her name popped up. She was an extra, but maybe also, she was the heroine? Something vague and noncommittal but also insistent. Certainly she had been touched by the great ape in some shape or form, and that was all there was to know about it. As a kid, this was enough for me. I was thirty-four years old when Mary Anne died on November 8, 2016, barely memorialized, with a placeholder obituary probably issued by the coroner. They got her birth date comically wrong as “June 18, 2016,” and in the process created what looked like a tragic death notice for a newborn. The inaccuracy was vexing. For years I had been collecting death notices for my relatives with the obsession of a fanboy and a cataloger. The baseball-card-like funeral cards I’d piled up were only the barest of genealogical evidence, and my own free subscription to popular family history site Ancestry.com blocked me with paywalls at every turn. So when Mary Anne died—my first significant family death in the age of Web 2.0—I had hoped for something big, weighty, and useful, something to root my family tree deeper. But there was nothing there. Just a black hole of information. But a black hole is, at least in my rudimentary understanding of astrophysics, not an absence but an extreme presence. A density of matter so hungry for light that photons cannot escape it. So I shone my little light into this black hole, embodied by the local cluster of papers jumbled in my parents’ attic. So there’s me, Christmas Eve, 2017, with my iPhone’s flash-light shining in the dark recesses of the attic, hunched over old documents and photos heaped into a plastic tub. And there she finally was, Mary [End Page 77] Anne Scully, in a headshot copyrighted 1961. “E.P.L.P. Productions: King Kong.” ________ My mom had joined Ancestry.com and submitted a dna sample. What was revealed hewed close enough to our basic mathematical computation of her heritage: 75 percent Irish and 25 percent German. She had signed up for a high tier of service, in the two-hundred-dollar range, and had pursued her genealogy but only to the limits of what she could recall. That is, our family tree grew only as tall as her memory was long. I, shameless cheapskate and relentless quester, was only too happy to take over her account and start filling in gaps and extending the timeline backward into history. Baptismal records from Ireland started sharing a digital shoebox with portraits in mid-century yearbooks. I was finding relatives dating back to the age of scientific racism, when images of “Irish apes” adorned popular magazines just as Ireland’s population flooded foreign shores seeking relief from famine. And individual stories with casts of characters were emerging for me. Some were new, like how my great-great-grandaunt Mary Lavelle was murdered in her home on January 1, 1923, by her unstable husband, who later died in Philadelphia’s favorite Halloween ghost house, Eastern State Penitentiary. Other stories were known but starting to become documented, like how her nephew, Vincent—my great-grandfather and Mary Anne’s father—made his way from Manchester and finally to Philadelphia, where on one awful New Year’s Day at the age of eleven, he would hide himself away in an upstairs bedroom as his aunt was shot five times in the stomach. Compelling as they were, these stories always felt full of holes. My dead remained half known, half guessed. Completing their profiles became an obsession. I was visiting the Philadelphia City Archives on some days off, the Free Library of Philadelphia on others, and sneaking in research breaks at the university library where I work. Like a protagonist in an eerie horror film, I was scouring microfilm...