As a child, my favorite pastime was flipping through the photo albums on my grandparents’ coffee table. I built a timeline of myself, stretching back farther than I could remember. This is me as a baby, this is me at a wedding I was too young to remember attending, this is when my cousin was born, here are the two of us on the beach. Soon, I started stretching it to before I existed. I found my mom as a teenager, my grandparents on their honeymoon, their parents holding them as babies. Ancestry.com has been a natural hobby. It also helps prove to me that I exist.
The first time I got on the site I traced my mom’s family back to the 1600s. It was easy. I already knew a lot of pertinent names and details that made finding records easy, and luckily I came from a family that had records kept of them. They came from Scotland and Germany and England and the Netherlands. They left diaries and accounts of surgeries. There is a photograph where I look exactly like my great-grandmother, and I mean exactly, down to our dark eye circles. Literally, it me.
There is this prevalent idea, one that sites like Ancestry.com promote, that by knowing our personal histories we can move forward with a clearer picture of ourselves. Our story is made richer by the context of our lineage, the argument goes, and in fact we are not quite real until we have it. In one advertisement a man says he grew up believing he was of German descent, and through the site found out he was Scottish. Thanks to Ancestry.com, he abandoned his German dance club and bought a kilt. The argument is now he knows the truth. Now he is real. (That identity can be so quickly traded for white people is a whole other issue.)
But there are holes I can’t fill, both in the whos and the whys. Aside from the dead ends and misspelled names and the 100 different Benjamin Johnsons born in 1700-something that I could possibly be related to, there’s the fact that I don’t actually know these people. I don’t know what inspired those Dutch ancestors to move from Brooklyn to New Jersey, or what made them come to America in the first place. I don’t know what combination of pro-slavery and pro-Virginia feelings made my great-great-grandfather turn against the Union. I don’t know why any of them fell in love, or if they even did before they got married.
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There’s a myth about atheists, perpetuated often both by atheists and by those of faith, that all atheists are just secretly pining for a sense of spiritual belonging. They are jealous of the camaraderie and community they see in religion, and that’s why they a) will find religion eventually, b) start things like “atheist churches,” or c) yell at people on the internet. I do not feel I am lacking by not having a spiritual structure for my life. What I am in search of is something tangible. A list of names and dates and places that prove I am here and I am me.
I’ve always had a lot of anxiety about place. I like to have a plan. I like to know where I am and where I’m going. Second to photos, I pored over my mom’s giant atlas, placing fingers where I was born, where mom and dad were born, where they went to college, and how far it was from where I am now. If the schedule I’ve built for myself in my head gets disrupted, I panic, whether it’s because of losing a job or because the laundry needs to get done tomorrow instead of today.
I think it’s because, on some level, I know that all of this is chaos. That if my parents hadn’t gone to the same college, if their parents hadn’t both settled in New Jersey, that if hundreds of people hadn’t moved from their respective countries to right around here, I wouldn’t exist. It is awesome and terrifying. It inspires me and cripples me. And I don’t want to think the chaos is really divine. I just want to pin it down for a second.
It’s easy to get caught up in the terror of coincidence. At a certain point, the people in the tree need to stop being family. I’ve never met them, I’ve never loved them. And really, they do not give me a clearer picture of myself. Finding out somebody 200 years ago was from Germany instead of France doesn’t help me figure out what to do with my life. I am not more whole because I know the name of the town my 6th-great grandfather lived in. Nothing about me can be found there. It’s just a collection, but instead of stamps and thimbles, it’s people with whom I share diminishing amounts of DNA.
They could do me a favor and not all be named David, though.
“terror of coincidence” — Oh gosh the internal turmoil that was in my head as a high schooler, realizing that if my dad hadn’t been drafted into the Vietnam War, delaying his post-college career, he never would’ve ended up living in the town where he met my mom.
The terror of coincidence is so real — my parents met thousands of miles from home in another country, because my mother overheard my Dad say the name of her very teeny tiny hometown at an event (he’d worked for a summer there). She got really excited and jumped into his conversation, and 40 years later, here I am.
I find it so weird that my parents grew up and met in the south-east of England, but their families are both from the same sort of area in the north-west (my dad was born in Oldham and his surname is most commonly found in Lancashire; my mum’s side of the family has a family tree that goes back to the late 1700 and loads of the people on it are Lancashire cotton weavers or similar). If their families hadn’t both moved to the same area of East Sussex, might they have met anyway?
I found out through Ancestry that my mother’s maternal grandfather had had a first wife, and that he married her (my mother’s) grandmother after the first wife died. I told my mom, and she didn’t think that her mom even knew. But what if the woman hadn’t died??? There’s a parallel universe out there where this lady got to grow old and maybe have kids, and maybe who knows the Kennedy assassination or something didn’t happen because my great grandfather had a different family.
I live in Portland only because my dad accepted early retirement from the Navy and was hired by Intel in the mid-1990’s and they decided to put him here (we were living in Virginia Beach at the time). They almost moved us to Phoenix. Living in the Portland metro area is such a huge part of who I am now that I always, ALWAYS wonder what I would be like now, doing now, if they had moved us to Phoenix.
I feel all of this so much.
I also look just like my great-grandmother. It is disconcerting. I also look so, so much like my brother, which is why I think that my nephew is fine with me even though he’s at the age (10 months) where he’s otherwise not ok with anyone but his parents and my parents (who provide his childcare), and even though I don’t see him very often. I look like his dad but shorter and with long hair.
All of mine are named Eldred. There are seriously three or four generations where every other male spawn is named Eldred and it drives me insane trying to sort them out. Plus Ancestry doesn’t have much in the way of quality control. There’s one case in my tree where, based on other user records, it absolutely insists that this one particular woman was born ten years after her daughter.
When I was in college my theatre department did this Shakespeare festival with two other universities in the state, where we each did a play and then traveled to each of the schools to put it on. There was a big pizza thing when the other schools came to visit and I hosted one of the students from one of the schools, and during the dinner I got to talking to her director. I mentioned that my great uncle, my maternal grandpa’s brother, used to teach there and still regularly attended the plays as well. He asked who he was and when I gave his name he looked shocked and asked me to verify multiple times that I was directly related to my great uncle, then proclaimed, “We’re related!!!” My family is very into ancestry and genealogy and all that and apparently so was his, and it turns out we have a common ancestor way way back a great great, etc. something. It became a big story that everyone around the festival heard about and was very fun but after they left I didn’t stay in touch with him, and I don’t even think I mentioned it to my great aunt and uncle the next time I saw them. In fact, I forgot about it for a long time.
So what I’m saying is I totally agree. I was feeling unsettled in my choice of theatre major at the time and I took that meeting as some big sign that I had made the right choice. Look, someone related to me, someone with at least some shared history to me, is doing this, and he’s doing well and it all worked out for him, maybe I’m not the black sheep after all. But now years later I’m not at all involved in theatre and not upset about it at all, and that guy was just some guy who I happened to share a common ancestor with 250 years ago, just like I do with thousands of other people who are doing all sorts of things, theater and not.
In high school history I found out I had the same Mayflower ancestors as a classmate. But John Alden and Priscilla Mullins were notoriously prolific.
Perfect ending.
When my daughter was born, I got very into genealogy. I traced some parts of our family back hundreds of years, others only a couple of generations. I’ve also been fascinated by why they chose to go the places they did and how that all ended up with me. It’s all such a roll of the dice. I’ll never truly know their motivations, no matter what the records say.
I also have a photo of an ancestress who has my eyes- dark circles and a high eyebrow. I didn’t find it disconcerting. I found myself thinking, “So that’s where those came from!” Genetics are so fascinating to me.
Jaya — this was lovely.
I can’t even begin to parse my relationship with my family history. I’m frequently struck by how much my ancestors would have loathed each other — when I was in grad school, I found a whole bunch of virulent anti-Jacobin pamphlets written by an ancestor of mine at the time of the French revolution, decrying democracy, class intermingling, etc. I’m amused by how horrified he would have been at the life/marriage choices of his descendants (shouldn’t have squandered your family fortune gambling, dude, if you wanted to keep your kids in your precious upper class).
I don’t want to ruin Ancestor.com guy’s day, but if he’s Scottish, he’s still German. You know?
That was my takeaway from my Medieval Lit class. Three-quarters of European nationalities can be defined by “What century was it when the Germans took over?”
My boyfriend’s dad is super into the fact that he’s Irish-American, and when I looked up their last name I lol’ed to find out that that name goes back to a Norman invasion of Ireland. I mean, yeah, it was the 1300’s, so certainly long enough to be Irish, plus it’s more complicated than that, but still!
the entire concept of identity is intriguing to me. I keep thinking about doing the 23andme DNA test because, I want to know who I am. I’m interested in genealogy and genetics and I wish that I knew more about my biological family.
I just sent in my 23andme test and am waiting for results. I can try and report back on it when they come in!
From the reviews I read it’s much more relevant for people interested in medical background vs. genealogy, although they do give some info on regional background and have a database that you can try and use to connect to people. Some of the sites let you import your enough from another site too.
I did 23andme! I did it right before the FDA thing (which I think might be resolved now?) so I got a bunch of medically relevant information too, which was my main goal. The genealogy thing is not too specific. I got told that I was mostly European, with a bit of Native American, which is what I was expecting. They did break it down into more specifics than “European” (eastern, western, balkan, what have you) but I already knew I was a mutt of European ethnicities and it reflected that.
It did tell me I was something like 0.5% Japanese (but with very low confidence). When I told my grandmother that she got all excited and was like “Yes! My cousin married a Japanese lady!” and that’s when I found out my grandmother does not understand genetics.
I also did 23andme. I went with them because based on DNA test comparisons http://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_testing_compa… it rated them as the most accurate as far as pinpointing where your ancestry is from, which is what I really wanted to know, and then I was interested in the health testing part. Plus they test neanderthal DNA, which was really fascinating (I think National Geographic’s is the only other one to test that)–being mostly northern European, turned out I have a higher than average amount of neanderthal DNA. If you’re doing it to try to find ancestors/family trees though, they are a much much smaller site than ancestry.com, so it isn’t really good for that.
I did 23andme a few years ago. I’m a sperm donor baby and met someone on the internet who we thought might be my donor, so we both got tested. Turned out we weren’t related, but I appreciated getting some insights into ancestry background and I used the raw data from 23andme with a service called Promethease to get a whole bunch of health info. (The new FDA-approved 23andme health info is fairly banal. They do a lot of carrier tests that I imagine are helpful for people who do in fact end up being carriers, but they no longer give reports on things like disease risks and medication tolerances.) Then I didn’t think about it for a while, until one day I logged in on a lark and I had a half sister.
It was, at first, an incredibly stressful experience. I sent her a message and just hoped she wouldn’t be freaked out. Long story short, she’s amazing. We were born the same year, look uncannily alike, and are generally just creepily similar. We talked via email and phone for a while and met in person for the first time about a year ago. Then a half brother showed up on the site, though he’s been way-sporadic with contact. And it turns out he has a twin. So now we’re amassing this crazy cabal of sperm donor siblings.
I mention all this because the way you phrased it seemed as if you don’t have much knowledge in the way of biological family. I totally recommend it. I still haven’t quite figured out where my emotions about this familial contact and knowledge stem from, but they’re good emotions. There is, of course, the potential for bad, and once you know things you can’t un-know them, but I think it’s a really interesting window into identity. Like, “Okay, I have this information, does it change anything about me? Why or why not? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?????”
This is beautiful. My dad is very much into genealogy, I think for the sense of heritage and history that he gets from it.
We both got genetic ancestry tests done a while ago, and while it was really interesting and told us some things we didn’t know, my biggest takeaway was this aching knowledge that I’ll never have the full story of who my ancestors were. There are just so MANY of them. I may know my mtDNA haplogroup, but I’ll never know who was the last one to pray to a god their parents didn’t, or the first one to know what the eff a tomato is. Besides some broad strokes that we can guess at, I won’t know where they came from and how they lived. But I wouldn’t be here without them. That staggers me to think about.
“aching knowledge that I’ll never have the full story”
Me too. I love genealogy, but I know it will never tell me how my ancestors felt about things. I have a relative who married her former brother-in-law (he had previously been married to her younger sister, who then died) and I have so many questions – how did she feel about him? did she marry him because she loved him or because it kept the family together? how did the kids from the first marriage feel about their aunt becoming their mother? Short of finding a long lost diary, though, I’ll never know. I can learn about their lives and make guesses – for example, my ancestress and her sister and brother-in-law and their children all lived together before the sister died, so the children probably knew their aunt pretty well before she married their father – but ultimately I will never really know these people.
David Thomas. In Wales. Not even gonna try.
(Someone on my dad’s side did the Scottish side of the family, tho. It goes, “boat owner /fisherman married teacher” back to the 1700s.)
You could just pick the one with the best story and decide he’s yours.
A bit late but, that’s exactly what my grandmother on my dad’s side did. Jones from somewhere in Wales & she “tracked it” to some 1300s graveyard but we’re all pretty sure she just picked the most interesting story to tell at parties (which still isn’t that interesting.)
oh hey, i bet we are related (except Thomas/Wales so how would we ever even know)
Yeah, my Jones comes from a Frank Jones who left Wales in the 1890s-ish. The rest of the family, however, is Eastern European of various varieties (peasants and/or Jews) who only seem to have entered official records when confined to insane asylums.
We’re probably related, another Jones from Wales here! Left in the late 1800s. Alfred Joneses, tons of ’em.
Is this like that time my dad tried to find the Evans family, in Wales?
Ha! Your poor dad.
My last name, which has always been reasonably rare every place I’ve lived, is apparently pretty dang common in Poland. It’s the name of a Polish Pottery company and a furniture company and lots of other stuff.
i found a whole rat’s nest of Johns and/or Sarahs who kept marrying their first cousins, also named John and/or Sarah, for several generations running. and because they were all cousins, it was Wyckoffs all the way down. it took me most of an evening to sort them out.
this is why i leave the ancestring to my aunt, who is genius at this stuff (but unfortunately discovered that my ex and i are 8th cousins)
I once spent a whole afternoon reading wikipedia articles related to first-cousin marriage. It’s apparently super common all over the world and always has been; and only creates stuff like the Habsburgs when it continues down one line for too long.
The fact that first cousin marriage (or any cousin marriage) has become taboo in our society so quickly is fascinating. It’s still legal almost everywhere — yet you have to explain that first cousin marriage was the norm when teaching Mansfield Park and people get squicked out at the thought of kissing their third cousins (seriously, you’re fine if you reproduce with your second or third cousins).
This is so great. I have a weird relationship with genealogy and Ancestry in particular, because as an ex-Mormon it’s all tied up in their ordinances for the dead, which were always super creepy and off-putting to me (and one of the reasons I left), but it’s also something that was instilled in me as being important since I was really young. So it’s really lovely to read something like this, where you can love researching your ancestry for reasons unrelated to religious weirdness is fantastic. I especially loved this:
“I do not feel I am lacking by not having a spiritual structure for my life. What I am in search of is something tangible. A list of names and dates and places that prove I am here and I am me.”
Fellow ex-Mormon here! I share your feelings and a residual dread of genealogy. I tried to get into genealogy as a teen, because my patriarchal blessing told me to, but this article makes a much better case.
My mom loves Ancestry.com because she feels like it’s a mystery she can solve- she loves finding a new document or something she can link to another one but I think she has the same struggles of not figuring out the why of it all. Which is a total contrast with my Dad, whose family arrived in Boston in the 1640s and then moved out to Western MA where they all lived in the same exact town until my grandpa moved back to Boston in the 70s for a job. But at some point in the 1800’s somebody that lived in the town where my whole family lived decided to write a book about their area, not anything official but more like a “these are the people who live around me and what they’re like”. So my Dad has a book which has whole paragraphs devoted to describing his family in the 1800s- how they acted, what they did, how they related to the other people in their town, and my mom is still trying to figure out what her grandfather did after he left home in 1915. It’s interesting to think about! Census records are great, in other words, but they can only give you so much.
I feel like I should also mention that my dad brought this up for the first time very casually, as in “well (name of book) did say that my family is notorious for having bad tempers!” which really annoyed my mom, who knows practically nothing about her family.
I have a weird relationship to genealogy stuff. I’ve always been super interested in my family’s history on my mom’s side in particular, which is SUPER INTENSE and fascinating, but it’s pretty much all oral history because they immigrated to the US in the 1950’s from Germany and even if there wasn’t an ocean and a language barrier between me and more information, there’s also the whole “two world wars” thing. On my dad’s side, one trail runs cold in the 1920’s – again, immigration – and the other peters out around 1870 when some German/Polish farmers decided to come try their hand at Michigan.
There’s an inherent level of privilege in being able to track your family back for centuries and centuries – it means they had the means and social connections for someone to bother tracking their family’s births, it means those records mattered to someone enough to be retained, etc. Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be interested in, for the reasons Jaya discusses above, but it is something to be mindful of, since sometimes even boring Midwest white girls like me can’t get particularly far, let alone more recent immigrants, or even more significantly, people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. I feel like sometimes people who are really into ancestry stuff get pushy about it in a WELL EVERYONE CAN FIND OUT, IT’S SO FUN! way and well… not everyone can, y’know?
(All that being said, MY GREAT-UNCLE HAS STUFF IN MOMA WHICH IS SUPER COOL TO ME? http://www.moma.org/collection_ge/artist.php?arti… He also illustrated the first edition of Kafka’s Metamophosis !)
There’s an inherent level of privilege in being able to track your family back for centuries and centuries Thank you, this.
My grandfather spends decades researching his family history in all directions as far as he could go (quite far). It always bothered his wife, my grandmother, as it was a huge contrast with her very poor recently immigrant family — the family history bug really emphasized the differences between them.
It’s intensely painful for my partner and their dad to hear about ancestry stuff, since partner’s paternal grandmother was a half-Native American woman who was raised by her white father and forbidden to know her mother or her mother’s family. They are clearly multiracial and deal with racism on a daily basis, but they don’t have any cultural connection and there’s no way to find her history. There’s something similar on my mom’s dad’s side of my genetic family, too.
Cultural genocide is just the best.
Even without immigration in the mix, yeah. My dad has got really into it but the furthest back he’s got for anyone, his side or my mums, is a tenuous maybe 1830s link. And this is in England where the records are pretty good. But they were all poor, and no one kept track of them.
I come from a family where most branches can be traced back an amusing number of generations…but then there’s my maternal Czechs. There it’s mom, grandma, great-grandma, IMPENETRABLE WALL that has resisted years of assault by my ancestry-happy mother. And *that’s* just the transition into, reputedly, the most research-friendly country in Eastern Europe.
You are so right about the privilege thing. A few years ago I was really into the African American Lives specials with Henry Louis Gates on PBS. For some reason the idea that black people needed to look at property records instead of census records to find their ancestors was thing that really got to me.
I was disappointed by a lot of what I found in my genealogy research. I found a ton on my dad’s side, but it was just German/Swiss anabaptists named Johann and Barbara as far as the eye can see. No one married anyone outside their group. They came to America for what I (admittedly, knowing very little about it) consider stupid reasons. Just continue believing one arbitrary religious thing instead of the other! Go with the one that doesn’t blow up your whole life! I did find a possible Native American connection on my mom’s side, though I haven’t been able to pin it down. If anyone knows why an Iroquois man would have a super French name like Pierre le Normand die Joliecoeur, and if he definitely had a daughter named Therese, let me know.
I don’t have any details for you but I can tell you there was a toonnnnn of, uh, intermingling, between the Iroquois and French fur trading communities.
You might want to look into the Metis history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_(… of which famous rebel Louis Riel was one.
I love ancestry and especially names. I think surnames are fascinating, particularly the ones that were butchered and shortened when they were americanized. Both of my parents’ family names are incredibly unusual. In fact, there are exactly 14 people in the world who have my mom’s maiden name. My last name (my dad’s) is slightly more common; there are probably a few thousand of us, but I’ve still never met someone who shared my surname who wasn’t relted to me.
However, no one in my mom’s family has managed to find out much from before my great grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century. Records on farmers in the parts of eastern/central Europe that have changed nationalities multiple times are pretty much a lost cause.
A British study found that about 5% of men aren’t the biological fathers of their children and don’t know it. So when I think about ancestry on my father’s side I think okay, in each generation there’s a 5% chance the father isn’t the guy you think he is, multiplied by how many generations… My last name is from the 12th century, but how likely is it that I’m actually the descendant of the first man to have it? Pretty small!
That is so interesting! And also why, although I love following ancestry stuff, I get frustrated.
I don’t want to know the “good and proper” story. I want to know who had affairs and who really this kid belonged to.
My great-grandfather (who I never met) was a genealogy nut with a capital “Sheesh!” I inherited a black leatherette binder of his “documents,” including a charming article purporting to trace the lineage of every prominent American leader back to Isabelle of Vermandois, and yellowed newspaper obituaries with cryptic notes about “Murder!” in the margins.
I have a document stating that an ancestor of mine changed his will the night before having a duel with Teddy Roosevelt’s uncle. I haven’t been able to ascertain how the duel went.
I only recently learned who my grandfather’s father was thanks to Ancestry (and the National Archives – thank you whoever scanned all those old passport applications!). I wish my grandfather were still alive, because I think it’s something he’d like to know, even though he never really asked his mother any details. It was also sad because the man married another woman only 9 months after my grandfather was born. His mother told him his father died in a car accident before he was born, but he actually died the year my grandfather turned 18.
It’s a story of a young woman getting pregnant by a man who wouldn’t marry her and who felt she needed to lie to her son. But it’s also the story of a strong woman who, as a single mother in the 20s and 30s, raised one of the best men I’ve ever known.
That’s almost the same story I have, except it was my mom’s story and the 1940s. My “grandfather” even tried to buy my mom from my grandma at his wife’s urging when she was 3, because their daughter had just died. Later, I found out that he died in the town I now live in, which is in a totally different state!
My mother’s mother’s father was born somewhere in Austria-Hungary in the 1880s and emigrated to New York as a young man. He left his family in 1939, and that was the last we’d heard of him – except I found a death record for someone with the same name and same day of birth (but off by a year) in Brooklyn, 1971. So if this really was the same guy, he lived into my mom’s teens but never met her.
Not long after looking into all that, I went to Europe for the first time and spent a while in Vienna. It was a really different experience than it would have been without knowing anything about my great-grandfather’s life – I don’t know if he was ever in Vienna himself, but when he was growing up it would have pretty much been the center of his world. *He*, as a Hapsburg subject, was who all those palaces and museums were designed to impress. But he left that, and started a new life, and then after a few decades he left that one as well. As far as I know, there’s nobody alive who could tell me what he was like – but even the broadest outlines have done a lot to inform my relationship with the past, and my understanding of my grandmother and mother.
My biological father died before I could ever really learn much about his family (and may have changed his name upon coming to America from Japan anyway). My mother’s family can only be traced as far as her father, who fled China due to the Communists, the British, or both, and changed his name when a different Chinese family in Malaysia took him in.
I used to feel unmoored about it until I read “The Blind Assassin.” An unknown ancestry isn’t a lack of identity for me anymore. It’s the ability to revise and rewrite at will.
I found out last week that my maternal grandmother was a war bride. I had always thought that she moved to the US before she met my grandfather; as it turns out, they met when he was an American soldier stationed in her town in occupied post-WWII Germany. He turned out to be sort of terrible, and absolutely a liar–they separated not a decade later.
It’s disappointing, because I’ve always liked the idea of tracing my ancestry, but there’s no practical way to do so.
My maternal grandfather lied about his family (we suspect it is because the “Cheyenne” grandparent he credited with his very-dark-for-a-white-man coloring was not, in fact, a native of any sort but actually black) and had an extremely common name and the sort of life that didn’t lead to much official documentation. My maternal grandmother’s family was almost entirely killed during the second world war, and her town was bombed out almost entirely, the church and its records destroyed. She so clearly hates talking about her childhood (understandbly, as wwii germany was not a pleasant place) that I can’t bring myself to ask about her family or their history, even though I know there’s only so much time left.
The other half of my family came to the US from Ireland several decades ago, fleeing something. The original emigres won’t talk about it. I suspect there was major crime of some sort involved.
One of my great-great-grandmothers died of an illegal abortion and that’s why I ended up doing ancestry stuff. She died when she had small children and between the family being broken up after her death and her husband’s snooty family not wanting to talk about something they viewed as distasteful, she got erased, sort of. Oddly enough remembered by people who hadn’t met her, like my grandfather, but no information compared to the rest of the family. And something about the urge to brush the whole thing under the rug just made me so pissed that I had to go and hunt down everything I possibly could about her, even if in the end it makes no difference. Just…all those anti-choicers who are so dismissive about women dying from illegal abortions, but it really happens and people just don’t know because it’s kept quiet, and there are so many shitty things like that.
That happened in my family as well, my great-grandmother died of an attempt to self induce an abortion, and my grandmother ended up being raised by her aunts. I can only imagine how difficult that situation was for everyone.
The kids ended up getting sent to live with aunts and uncles in my family as well. Basically scattered all over the country and the older boys became farmhands at like, maybe 10 years old. The repercussions were intense for everyone involved.
Both sets of my grandparents met at dances that my grandfathers weren’t supposed to attend. One of my grandfathers walked into a Y dance b/c he really had to use the restroom, the other crashed a party, and thinking about that gives me a lot of mirth/existential angst.
My grandparents on my dad’s side also met at a dance, at a big band dance hall. My gram told me once that when he introduced her to his (Italian immigrant) family, he said they met at church.
So you could say they met at a dance he wasn’t “supposed” to be at, but with a slightly different meaning.
Looks like my fellow archivists are steering clear of the comments section on this one … regardless, in case anyone is curious about the Ancestry business model, and the business of genealogy in general, I’m just going to leave this here: https://archivesoldmole.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/…
Ugh. I knew about the baptizing the dead thing, but not the prison labor. *keeps reading links*
As the partner of an archivist whose digitisation NPO is under constant threat from AncestryDotCom and their entanglement in US records, I didn’t really know how to comment on this article without being a wet blanket. Thanks for posting the link in an informative way, allanaaa.
Family history can be a thrilling research topic, but its current practice is fraught with suppression and privilege. My white grandmother is addicted to genealogy research of European families and travels to gravesites & local archives for records. My Native mother can’t say the word “Ancestry” without bitterness & changing the subject.
ETA: sorry, moved this comment to be in reply here.
This is a great piece! I feel essentially no interest in knowing about my ancestors except that I guess I need to root for Ukraine whenever there’s a World Cup? Anyone past a generation or two is as much a stranger to me as all of the other people who lived in the past. But I am also one of those people who really bristles at the idea of “blood is thicker than water” (even though that’s not even the original meaning of the phrase!) and the idea that you owe your family love/affection/attention whatever just because they’re related to you, so maybe it ties into that somehow.
I like knowing ancestors not because I’ll ever know them, but because they connect me to distant relatives all over the world. My grandma regularly exchanges letters with distant cousins in Austria and Germany and I’ve even visited my grandma’s cousin’s daughter in Vienna.
Though I suppose since my known ancestors only go back to my great grandparents’ parents, everyone’s still pretty closely related.
I wrote my grandparents an email today; I sent it just before I read this.
My grandparents grew up in Copenhagen while it was Nazi-occupied. They lived 10 minutes away from one another, but they didn’t meet for 15 years and then they met in a dance hall in San Francisco when my grandfather turned to his friend, pointed at my Mormor, and said, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”
True story. Mormor told me so.
I crave their stories. My grandfather had a health scare recently– it’s going to take a lot of recovery and he’s already 83 years old. There’s not a lot of time left to gather those stories, to hold them close. I want to know what exactly it was that landed him, as a young sailor, thrown into a Cuban jail after one too many cuba libres (he cried for his mama, says the story). I want to know what it was like to be 19 years old, to leave your home and family, and to move 5000 miles from Copenhagen to San Francisco and what it was like to live in a women’s boarding house and what it was like to get ready for dates and to navigate that life. I want to know I need to know. I need to know what perfect cosmic dance brought this all together.
I am a librarian by trade, and people are libraries full of original manuscripts. I want to put my fingerprints on them, read them close, look for the scratchings in the margins.
I have such a weird relationship with Ancestry. One one side of my family, I can trace back to the 1400s- thanks Catholic Church records. On the other side, I can only trace back to my mother’s grandparents, and what I know of them is a mixture of lies and truths and half-truths that they told simply to be allowed into the country. Everything past them is unknown because they gave different stories- age, last name, what boat they came on, what port city the left- to each custom’s agent and census agent to hide the fact that they were Russian Jews. But it is these lies, these half-truths, these unknowns, these lost ancestors that have shaped me more than the clear lineage I see on my other side. I let the unknown and the lost define my ancestry. I don’t know if that is a me thing or if it is a normal reaction of the descendants of a persecuted and disparate people. Maybe this is just how I embrace my identity as a Jew in the diaspora?
Anyways, the other side of my family founded Quebec, and that is also pretty cool, even though it causes less existential examination.
I’m Greek. There are exactly 2 names per gender allowed for my ancestors, and Ancestry.com is so confused by me.
All the men in my family are named “Richard,” “Donald,” or “Kenneth”. And all the “Richards” also have the same middle name. Totally useless for trying to do a genealogy.
I’ve told this story on here before but anyway, my grandmother was adopted. This meant that genealogy for her side of the family was not really an option. My cousin is really into genealogy and she did the DNA test and ended up finding that other family. Everyone involved had passed away so the emotions weren’t really involved, but the extended family was able to piece together what had happened and my cousin is still in contact with those new cousins. I just wish my grandmother could have known. And it was cool to have that part of the family tree filled in.
The work my cousin has done is interesting in the sense that it makes history our history. Like the person who signed a petition in support of the Revolutionary War or the voter registry showing that an ancestor participated in the statehood vote. History becomes about more than just places and dates.
Genealogy seems to be a more complicated topic than my dads hobby gave me cause to believe. I will just leave you with one fact. One of my great great grandfathers was a ‘notorious poacher’ (long suspected in family history, confirmed by a newspaper article about him grassing on a different poacher), with the best name in history.
Hezikaiah Wrigglesworth Cryer.
If you have a child in the future and don’t use that as the namesake you will have wasted an incredible opportunity.
Well I suspect I won’t have kids, but I’ve been bugging my siblings to do it for years.
I was never especially interested in genealogy (I am fairly certain that everyone in my lineage was a stocky, humorless German farmer named Hermann), but oddly enough I fell way down a rabbit hole on the findagrave website a few weeks ago. I was looking for the date of my grandfather’s birth for some reason, and the site had not only his information, but links to all of the gravesites of people who could be verified (through whatever process??) as his relatives. My suspicions were mostly confirmed– ah yes, another Midwestern pig farmer in the cemetery of a church called St. Boniface– but it’s weirdly fascinating to see some stranger’s name and think “huh, if that dude were still alive he would probably feel obligated to invite me to Christmas dinner.”
A few years ago, I found out from that website that my great-grandmother’s father was a rabbi, so that was neat.
The only ancestry thing that makes me very curious is that my mom’s side of the family is from the Azores, and there is a likelihood that a lot of the Azorean communities may have absorbed the convertidos: http://portuguese-american-journal.com/almeida-me…
I think it would be DEEPLY interesting to know if my maternal line is a double assimilation- from moorish jewish settlers to Azorean Catholics who get to the US and become anglicized Americans. If I found that out, all bets are off as to how I fill out forms in future when it comes to race!
Form says, “what race are you”
Me, “What is even anything anyway? WHO ARE WE?!”
Jaya I’m sorry you feel the terror of coincidence, because I actually love my coincidence story! My grandparents’ first child, my uncle, was born with serious disabilities. At the time, they didn’t know what caused them, and they were worried about having more children. (Not that they didn’t love my uncle, but he required nearly full-time attention and they couldn’t have done that with more than one kid. Sidenote: the 1940s was not a good time to have complex needs, from a support services perspective.)
My best friend’s grandfather, meanwhile, was a statistician working at the University of Sydney, doing analysis of medical records about birth defects. He was on the team that discovered the link with pre-natal rubella, which my grandmother had while she was pregnant with my uncle.
So my grandmother, ten or twelve years later, was told by doctors that the problem wasn’t genetic and she could safely have more kids. And that’s how my mother was born! And 40 or so years later, the grandchildren of those two people met and we’ve been best friends for over 20 years. I love my bestie and I am frequently amazed to think that without her family, mine would never have existed, even though we’re not related. On reflection, as a depressive, I’m pretty surprised I have such a positive attitude towards this, but what can you do.
That is a really neat story.
As a demography student, I love thinking about ancestry as an illustration of populations giving rise to individuals. To me, that’s the only way to fathom it. I especially like to think about all my non-ancestors – the people who are related to me but maybe never had kids, or they did but their direct lines died out, like my grandfather’s sister. I know it doesn’t matter to them whether a currently-alive person (who will soon enough be an ancestor or a non-ancestor) is thinking about them or not, but it seems fair to include them.
On both sides of my family, until recently, if you went to a family reunion and yelled “HEY DAVID,” half the men would turn around.
I do wish I’d asked more about my dad’s side of the family before my grandpa passed away. I know that my great-great-grandfather was from Poland and was the founder of a tiny town in rural NE Michigan (not far from Alpena), but that’s about it.
And my gramma on my mom’s side did the research to find out we have Mayflower ancestors on that side.
I look so much like my mom it’s eerie, and now I’m wondering where SHE got her looks. I need to go back and look at photos of her mom when she was younger.
This essay gave me lots to think about, though–I sometimes wonder why I even care about who my ancestors were. Does it really matter?
My paternal grandfather was big into genealogy and he passed his files on to my dad, who I’m still waiting on to give them to me. I tried ancestry.com, but I couldn’t find neither my Norwegian nor Prussian ancestors there. They were kind of a big deal, though. The Norwegians were nobles prior to the abolition of privileges and the Prussians a bunch of doctors in the military. One was the finance minister of the state of Eastern Prussia.
I hope once I get some more names, from my moms side too, I’ll get further with the website. I have some relatives in the US too, as an aunt of my mom’s lived in New York and had kids there, I think
English people, English people for miles and miles and miles. I found a great-something or other on my dad’s side that was living in Scotland for a bit, but he too was actually English. Thrilling rumours of a Welsh Great-Great-Grandmother were unfortunately exaggerated. Still, they all did at least manage to cover a lot of ground WITHIN England.
For me the spiritual aspect of it is very interesting, and I hope that upon my arrival in heaven there is a small tucked away genealogy room where you can go and look up the things that God did in your family on a big computer. (I assume that all computers in heaven are of the bulky Windows 95 variety, for some reason)
Lol, I keep finding Irish ancestors only to discover that all of them are actually Scottish and were pretty much just passing through for a generation. Pretty much everyone is either English or Scottish, except for a single French strain and a rogue great-great-great grandfather who is from France, Germany, or Norway. Every record I can find differs on the particulars.
My partner’s dad has done a lot of genealogical research for his family and his wife’s (who are descended from John of Gaunt, probably! But via a few generations of illegitimate children), and he put his findings up on a family website. As a result, the half-brother he didn’t know existed found him and got in touch.
If the schedule I’ve built for myself in my head gets disrupted, I panic, whether it’s because of losing a job or because the laundry needs to get done tomorrow instead of today.
I am like this too; stuff needs to be the way I expected it, even if the changes are minor. Things like invitations out after work at short notice throw me into a panic, because I will get home at a different time to what I expected, and the meal planning I’ve done for the week will be thrown off, and so on. It’s not great.
“If the schedule I’ve built for myself in my head gets disrupted, I panic”
I can very very much relate to this. I have never been able to “go with the flow.” Rather I feel like I *am* the flow. It’s weird.
My family didn’t have much by way of “family history.” My parents were both older when I was born, so I never met my grandparents. Everything I know about where we came from, I found on ancestry.com or the LDS genealogy site, or the old and clunky sites that predate those. It’s interesting to trace my family from persecuted religious refugees, to wealthy mill owners, to down on their luck parents who sent their children to live with others. I actually do feel a connection with certain names on my tree, like my 5th great grandfather Samuel who fought in the Civil War for the North, and whose mother was institutionalized. You get snippets and suddenly you *relate*. For me, finding the familial ties is grounding, and makes me more sure of my step. I belong here. Hundreds and thousands of other people’s lives and choices led to me existing and that’s the most validating thing I can think of.
My girlfriend’s dad’s family has Serious Records about them going back several centuries. One day I spent hours digging and digging to see how far back I could go, and found out that she’s distantly related to all these famous stuffy dead English men. I felt mildly creepy doing it (she just thought it was silly), but a previous commenter’s remark about the feeling of solving a mystery is spot on. It’s just so cool to look for all this information, to work for it a little, and then to actually find it! And I don’t get to do that with my own family’s history, because Mao.
A great-uncle on my mom’s side is an excellent repository of oral histories, and his daughter (my mom’s cousin) has written a lot of them down, but that still only takes us back to my great-grandparents’ generation. (I do know neat stuff like that my great-grandmother was a young Communist and got to go to university in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, which is pretty badass considering that she’d been born into a family that bound her feet. Then she turned firmly anti-Communist once they decided that being educated was terrible and ran away to Taiwan and then Hong Kong.)
My mom’s mom and all of the family on my dad’s side, though, weren’t literate, and my dad’s family is pretty broken, so there are neither records nor oral histories there. In any case, my mom’s convinced that my dad is not actually his dad’s child, so maybe it doesn’t really matter! (Both of his parents had kids with a bunch of different partners, so this is pretty plausible. And he has a number of physical features that neither his dad nor any of his siblings have, including a very distinctive nose shape that he passed onto me.)
I have a picture of great grandparents on my mom’s side. I have always fixated on him, but suddenly realized one morning while looking in the bathroom mirror, that I look so much like her. It was interesting to me to find out that we of course get 50/50 of ourselves from each parent, but after that, all bets are off. So it is still likely to get a mix from all our grandparents, and so on down the line. I could still get 100% of grandmother DNA from one side, and none from the other. So instead of just 1/8, I might have more of her in me, and favor her.
I’m so happy to find so many Toasties who are interested in genealogy. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Ancestry for decades (hate especially after reading the links above) but I must say I am getting a kick out of seeing my connections from the DNA test. I’ve been able to help an adoptee find where they fit on our family tree, further proving my bad boy uncle was indeed a bad boy!
The mystery solving is the part I love. It is immensely satisfying to knock down a brick wall after years of making no progress. Thanks for sharing, Jaya!
I hit a wall when my mother told me her grandmother was adopted, but adopted from within the family. Apparently some underage cousin or sister got pregnant, and the baby went with another older married relative, but I have no idea which side of the family is the blood side and which side should I not bother researching.
And another great-grandmother had the surname of Smith, but I know from family legend that they changed it from Schmidt after immigrating from Germany pre-WW1. Can’t find anything to actually prove that, though. Nor the claim that one of my North Carolina ancestors was Cherokee. Every document has him claiming he was white (which may not be true, I know).
I just wish I more patience for the digging part. I was thrilled to find someone else on Ancestry had completely mapped out the Flewelling side (which I found out was not Welsh, but English).
I have a question about Ancestor.com and how it works (if anyone can drop any information, that would be sweet!) Does the site only pick up on documents from the U.S. or from around the globe? How do the documents get there, is it a sort of crowd-sourcing? Well, my entire family is from the Dominican Republic, and I have always loved hearing stories of my greats and great greats and further back. I’d also love to find tangible sources on my ancestry, but I’m not sure where to start.. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help!
Love this. I totally feel it.
My ancestry traces back, in just a few short generations, to polygamist Mormons. In fact I’m related to a very well-known one, and it was easy enough to find out that he was my great-great-great-grandfather. But I am missing some kind of crucial information that will tell me which of his five wives I’m related to.
Not knowing the identity of my great-great-great-grandmother has haunted me for years. According to the tradition of polygamist Mormons, I should consider all of his wives my ancestors. But they’re not. This whole thing is just pissing me off.
Ooh, this is a good story!
Johnsons! Fortunately for me, someone roughly three generations ago did a lot of the legwork for my mom’s side of my family, so I was mostly able to navigate the tangle that is Johnsons in the 18th century. (I think there were four first names they could choose from, and that seemed to last 2-3 generations.)
23andMe led to the connection that showed that my dad’s uncle actually died a lot later than my dad had always thought, and had had four children, so my dad actually had cousins he’d never known about and they had had kids and so on.
It took a mis-sent email for my dad to find his half brother though.
And it was a random night spent drinking with a friend and her friend from high school to find out that the friend from high school is the grandson of the half brother’s younger brother, who may or may not be related to my dad.
My great-great-grandmothers lived in the same tiny town in Scotland, were born a year apart, and had the Exact. Same. Name. I was terrified that they were actually the same person until I was able to prove otherwise through their marriage records.
That is so interesting! And also why, although I love following ancestry stuff, I get frustrated.
I don't want to know the "good and proper" story. I want to know who had affairs and who really this kid belonged to.