I ran into a quote lately from culture icon Thomas Mann. It goes like this: “The unresearchable plays a kind of mocking game with our researching ardor.”

That is, humans — or some of them anyway—have an itch to know how things began, how they got the way they are, what twists and turns created the world we inhabit. And many things can be learned, but some things lie forever beyond the veil.

I confess to being a nerd boy at heart. And one of the unresearchable things is how I happened to get that way in a family not especially inclined in that direction. But in school, for instance, I liked doing the research papers that many of my confreres feared and loathed.

There are two parts to any such endeavor – the research and the writing. I liked both, but the deadline being inescapable there was often the feeling of having to quit the research too soon.

Once you go down the rabbit hole chasing some topic, there can be an invigorating sense that there is no end to the pursuit. One room opens into another, one source leads to another, a footnote sends you down a new chute or a bit of serendipity in the stacks up a new ladder. The chase is on, the game is afoot.

Ecclesiastes says, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” But for some of us researching something new is weirdly exhilarating. I suspect Ecclesiastes just had a lousy chair and bad lighting.

But researching any topic can also be frustrating and infuriating as well, if enlightenment keeps receding in the distance like the mechanical hare before the flesh and blood greyhound at the dog track, or the tantalizing fruit beyond the reach of the tortured Tantalus.

So I admit the first thing I thought of when I read the Mann quote was family history. Anyone who has looked into his genealogy has had the experience of coming to what is known as a brick wall, a roadblock, a dead end.

This is the place where the paper trail ends, where you seem unable to follow what Frost called “the long bead chain of repeated birth” another generation further into the “dark backward and abysm of time.”

It’s maddening. My wife’s maternal grandfather was adopted and we know where and when, but the names of his birth parents seem to have vanished forever when the county courthouse where the records were kept was flooded. No way further back from this cul-de-sac seems possible.

My brick wall is my father’s maternal great-grandfather, Adam Trish. He was born in one of the petty states that now make up Germany in 1819, and came to America as a child or young teen, apparently with an uncle or aunt, apparently an orphan.

No ship’s manifest shows him during the time in question, presumably because children were not accounted for by name. And few people named Trish appear in the same records, and those do not seem likely to be the guardian for reasons of age or destination. Perhaps his guardian did not have the same surname. It might have been a maternal uncle, for example, surname unknown.

A memoir from a family reunion in 1934 claims that the wife of Adam Trish came from Alsace. But that turned out not to be true. I have managed to trace her origins further east, to a little town called Duttenbrunn in what is now Bavaria. So it is possible the Alsatian connection was garbled in transmission and in fact her husband Adam came from that little patch of land.

The surname Trish, or more likely Trisch, seems to be relatively rare in Germany, but it does pop up with greater frequency in the town of Kehl, just across the river from Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace. Tantalizing.

But speculations and inferences aren’t facts. They are what you are left with when the avenues for research reach the brick wall. Thereafter you are stuck with an itch you cannot scratch.

Adam Trish lived somewhere before he became a prosperous farmer near Columbus, Ohio. He came from Germany. His ancestors’ records are there, waiting in some church or civic archive. But just out of reach, leaving me grasping at straws, mocked by the unresearchable mystery of the past.