Bronson Hilliard

Picture: Bronson Hilliard (1964 --) with goatee, standing at grave of Jeremiah Hilyard (1817-1855) in Allentown Cemetery outside Lima, Ohio. June, 1995.

I had this crazy notion during the summer of 1995 that I was going to go back to Ohio to discover my Hilyard roots. I had the even crazier notion that I was going to grow my hair long. I did both, as you can see.

This picture kind of sums me up, I'm afraid. I am a prisoner of the past, with an obsessive interest in history and the ways in which it lives in all of us, magnifying or reducing our experiences, connecting us to the whole.

When I look at this picture, I think the Hilyard look is evident: prominent nose, forehead, squint. Thick-legged, as are all the men in my family, I represent here a long line of Hilliardity: that quality of being a Hilliard that all Hilliards/Hilyards must surely recognize.

For those who are interested, I am 34-years-old, unmarried, no children, and live outside Boulder, CO. I am a 1986 graduate of the University of Colorado, and now work at the University as a public relations specialist, which means I write press releases, field phone calls, and work in general to promote CU and its accomplishments around the state.

My real love is writing; I am a columnist at the Colorado Daily newspaper in Boulder. My column, "Pop Culture Shock," runs every Monday in the paper. It is a column that addresses the pernicious influence of popular culture (TV, movies, pop music, advertisins, sports, et al) upon the larger American culture.

I also am a cinema buff, a reader of history, biography, and cinematic works; an aspiring screenwriter/novelist; a local writer and editor, and a proud inductee into the CU Trivia Bowl Hall of Fame (1993). I am also, for some reason, very interested in genealogy.

Picture: Bronson Hilliard (with full beard, now) and Brendan Hilliard (bald and stout), together at Lyme Regis, Great Britain, in March, 1996.

This picture is of Bronson (1964 --) and Brendan Hilliard (1970 --) sons of Carl, grandsons of Tuff, great-grandsons of Jack, great-great grandsons of Noah, great-great-great grandsons of Jeremiah, great-great-great-great grandsons of Thomas, great-great-great-great-great grandsons of another Thomas, perhaps an immigrant from Europe, thus the intended irony of the picture.

Brendan, my younger brother by five and one half years, is also my current roommate. He is a part-time student at Metro State College in Denver and a sales associate with Lord & Taylor in Denver.

Brendan was born in Denver, and like me, raised in the north Denver suburb of Northglenn. He has studied acting for ten years, was accepted to but did not attend the American Academy of Dramatic Art, is a renowned expert on comic books and professional wrestling, and does hilarious imitations of various famous bald movie characters.

Brendan is single and, until his interests change, likely to remain so. We get along better now than we did growing up. By temperament, Brendan is like my father, which is to say, not even remotely interested in family history or genealogy.

This photo was taken on a trip to England with our mother, Lana Hilliard, in March, 1996. We visited the west country -- Devon and Cornwall. For those of you out there who might be interested, Lyme Regis is where the film "The French Lieutenant's Woman" was filmed.

This sums up the Hilliard men of the west, this photo: stolid-looking, not-too-excited, squinty, square-shouldered. I guess you could say we're the kind of men who keep the country running, even though we never end up in the histories anywhere.

We're Hilliards, after all.

End.

Written by Bronson Hilliard