This is the second in a series of essays titled “Honoring the Ancestors”. You can start the series here.
Our history is shaped by those who had the most impact and those that captured their stories in words, images, or sculpture. We speak of Brutus and Julius Caesar, not of their toga makers. Yet everyone contributed to getting us to this point. How do we learn more from - and honor - all of our ancestors, not just the ones that made it into print?
Keeper of the Family Tree
In our family it is my Mom who has often held the rôle of Keeper of the Family Tree. She is always ready to jot down genealogical details for an interested grand-child, like a football coach diagramming the next play with X’s and O’s. My siblings and I grew up with a large extended family and it was confusing to know how we were related to any given person on the croquet pitch. (As an aside, our version of croquet had little to do with ladylike or gentlemanly behavior: we brought some ice-hockey mentality to it. It was also played on a side-slope, the rough was at least a foot long, and out of bounds meant “in the pond”.)
My personal interest in genealogy began once I realized how much historical information was out there on the web already. I was able to find shipping news articles about ancestors who were ship captains, pictures of gravestones, and immigration records of family members. It’s a fun sleuthing game that has addicted many along the way, the payoff being a dopamine hit from uncovering a new piece of the ancestral record.
This year I decided to take the research to another level and dove into ancestry.com. It costs money but has so much information available and others have already put together sections of family trees that overlap with mine and Minette’s. Suffice it to say the tool is fantastic. It is possible to find much of the same information from free, public sources, but you will spend more time doing it.
One of ancestry.com’s features is called LifeStory where the tool builds up a timeline of the life of a given person on the tree. Users are encouraged to fill in more details about a person to make the story richer. Here’s an example of part of my great aunt Ethel’s story:
Now I know through family lore that Ethel wasn’t just the family centenarian, she was also a librarian in Brooklyn, NY. With a little more searching outside of ancestry.com I was able to find records of her attendance at an American Library Association annual meeting in 1926.
Ethel is one of the few in my family tree - certainly one of the few women - who have records outside of birth, baptism, immigration, wedding, and death. I only found this information because a) she had a job outside of the home, b) there was some public record of it and c) she hadn’t married so the records have her maiden name. Of course for many there are no records at all.
At this point in the investigation I start asking “Well, what will my descendants find about me 100 years from now?” and I have to rope in my ego. I’ll leave that for another essay: this is about honoring my ancestors, not curating my social media so that it will appear I was the next incarnation of Buckaroo Banzai.
The Importance of Story
Story binds us: as families, as cultures, as societies. Our ability to tell the story of our ancestors brings their lives, hopes, and desires to the present, and in doing so puts our own lives in a richer context. This is the essence of honoring our ancestors, even those who did not leave anything behind in the records.
I envy the strength of the storytelling tradition in the indigenous peoples of North America. It provides a way to share culture in mythos, teaching, and history. Each of us can adopt some of that tradition into our family. While it’s doubtful we can come up with a personal creation myth (I suggested to Minette that maybe we’re descended from Dragons and Faeries and she said she comes from Dragons and I get the Fae), we can still do our best to document and share our family’s stories. How? Here is a sketch of my plan.
Decide on the scope. Genealogy can be anything from a rainy day activity to a full-blown addiction. Just remember you don’t have to tell all the stories at once: maybe start with one person or one family whose story is dear to you.
Determine how much you want to pay. As with scope this can range from searching on some of the free genealogical websites, public records, and Google all the way to traveling around the world to visit graveyards. You can find a lot of information for free to start.
Organize the information. You might pay for a system like ancestry.com, download free genealogy software like gramps, or even just put stuff in a Google doc. Do not exclusively collect pictures and stories in a box. Getting them digitized and on the internet means they are a) more easily shared and b) less likely to get lost over time. Making it public takes advantage of the fact that the internet never forgets.
Collect information. On top of all of the regular things like birth dates, places, jobs, life events, and deaths what else can you find? Does your family have pictures, stories, or other writings about your ancestor? Does their name show up in a newspaper or publication? What was happening in the town they lived in? What were the local or worldwide stories that could have shaped their lives? Can you find pictures or other historical records for the area?
Write their story. Put the chronological details of their lives into the contextual information you collected. You might not get it perfect but write it anyway. Rope in other family members who might be able to add details or help edit. As you write it may help to think of yourself as the elder telling a story to the next generation. If there isn’t enough information for a specific person consider writing their story as part of the story of a family.
Tell the story. Pick a day (for me this will likely be every year on November 1st) to celebrate and tell the stories to your family members. If you can’t be with them in person, record yourself narrating the story and send them a link to the recording. Each year you can add new stories and update existing ones with new information.
Thriving longer
When we add a family tradition of writing, telling, and retelling the story of our ancestors we enrich our lives and the lives of our family members. We begin to see our lives as an extension of theirs, gaining wisdom from their choices. We shape our lives and families into something that will last: that’s what our ancestors hoped for.
Nice work, Brad! I'll pass this along to Dee as she's the keeper of our Mom and Dad's pics... I did the 23andme DNA, but haven't dove into the history yet. If you're ever in up visiting the folks, you've got a place to stay and we can catch up here on the Island! Hope you and yours are doing great. Cheers!
Great post, I especially love the reference to being an incarnation of Buckaroo Banzai! Your tips on how to get started doing this research are so helpful. This type of of process always seems challenging and hard to know where to start.