During the Winter Season, I have tons of time on my hands.
One of my fall back boredom busters is genealogy, and seeing just how far back I can trace any given line. If Internet sources are to be believed, my record is 1500s. Is it accurate? I have no idea.
My grandma was obsessed with genealogy. For that I'm thankful; tucked in all corners of the house were story-style notes, handmade books, pictures, and scraps of paper she'd started a tree so some new pieces of information could be jotted down.
All this paper existed because she didn't have the Internet to search. Her adventure was done via phone calls, personal conversations with out of town relatives home for the holidays, or letters with distant cousins. And boy did my grandma have tons of cousins - in fact, just this past season, my grandparents got a Christmas card from a poor soul in a nearby nursing home that ended up being a granddaughter to my grandma's great uncle. Sadly she had no idea my grandparents are long past, but I sure do envy the era she lives in, specifically a place where family ties matter and my grandparents are still alive.
So what's the point of digging up past, other than just wasting time?
For starters, my grandma was uncontrollably drawn to this obsession, so it's something I share directly with her. Before she passed, I was able to listen to stories, see her process, and generally learn about our family before researching. It has made my own research much easier, as I’m able to narrow down who I’m looking for based on where I know we came from.
Where she stopped, though, I press on. Her goal, I believe, was to preserve family history. To have bread crumbs started for a future generation (which turned out to be me and only me, the last of two lines). To start the stories of hundreds of people that would otherwise be lost to history.
What I have discovered should come as no surprise; being a white American, we all pretty much have the same origins. Pioneers, old English, German, Scottish, Irish. Some came later, some were precolonial. I didn’t bother to find out who came on the Mayflower, but at least one great grandfather has a Wikipedia page as being an early settler in Salem, 60 years before the witch trials.
Every search yielded stories; trace of a map of where they came from and where they ended up. I try to listen without judgement, to understand their motivations for moving (and considering where the bulk of my family ended up, the goal was land to farm). And most importantly, why they left the countries they came from.
Almost always my trails go cold once I leave America. Some family names I’ve heard might have been changed, the original spellings and pronunciations long forgotten, so tracing relatives in other countries is near impossible.
However, I’ve found this absolutely doesn’t matter.
As mentioned, there were no surprises in my European background. Yours might look a little different, such as the inclusion of Dutch/Norse, more recent lines of various nationalities, or a completely unique blend of heritages. The circumstances, countries, and years may have differed, yet the main reasons were all the same - the human drive to survive and thrive via migration.
All my ancestors, no matter the country, were all once part of older groups of societies. Romans, Celts, Gauls….it doesn’t matter. The global society has been ever changing for thousands and thousands of years, yet we’re all still the same people with the same motivation. Some of us might have an ancestor or two that was royalty or some notable person in history. Yet most of us come from multiple generations of the general population; people who just wanted to live. We are not the stories history tells of politics, religion, or other elite leadership games (unless you have that one famous relative, but chances are, it’s just one).
I’ve decided the names of the lost relatives don’t matter much, nor do I need to keep digging farther. I am the sum of my ancestors, and I carry deep within me the knowledge passively passed down. The answers of what to do when hardships arrive are already written in my DNA.
I just need to listen.
A peony bush that grows on our family farm, that dates back to at least the 1960s or before when my Grandpa’s ‘Granddad’ lived here. He didn’t want them cut for arrangements for Memorial Day graves because “they look prettier on the bush”.