Looking back on climbing the family tree
I’ve been at this exploration of our family’s trees – Sharon’s side and my side – for a year now and wanted to take a moment to reflect in mostly general terms on the discoveries I’ve made.
My family did not talk much about their heritage when I was growing up, and I admit that I had little curiosity. My mother had been estranged from her brothers for many years, and for reasons I can’t remember, finally decided to reconnect at the end of my high school years.
I had opportunity to visit a couple of times with my uncle and his wife, mother’s younger brother. What I discovered in those visits was an alternate history to the little I knew from Mother’s rarely shared stories. To be sure, much of the history jibed well enough, but a couple of stories varied significantly, especially the events surrounding the split between our families.
I knew Mother well enough to know she often changed the tale of her past to make her look more favorable and that she was not afraid of recounting incidents I had knowledge of to make for a better story than the historical reality. I expect that happens a lot in families.
Not surprisingly then, my explorations of the immediate past, up through my grandparents' time, gave me some confirmation of her stories and brought to light portions of the past I expect she deliberately hid from me because she found them embarrassing. And I understand that. But I would have been less shocked by those stories than she could have thought. One tale, though, I haven’t really figured out, and because all those who might be able to shed light on it are gone, I’ll never know why she altered the narrative.
This tale is the one where my father’s mother came to America to escape the persecution of Jews in Germany. The tale always implied that her arrival coincided with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Now, that’s when my grandmother applied for and was granted citizenship, so that may be the cause of the confusion. But grandmother came here early in the 1900s, when Germans of all stripes were coming to America. From what I’ve been able to discover, antisemitism was not a prime driver of Jewish immigration at the time, economics was.
I’ve learned that our histories are complicated, and the lore handed down may not always be accurate. And that can lead to bad assumptions. For instance, Sharon’s family has deep Texas ties, going back to the early 1800s. Before that, the family thread developed mostly in the south, going back to the Virginia Colony. My family’s roots tend to be almost exclusively northern in the U.S., and most of the family entered the U.S. as immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I occasionally tease my wife that her family and mine probably fought in the Civil War on opposite sides – and I’ve found evidence of that – and my side won.
Then I discovered she had ancestors from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And though her heritage is solidly English and Irish going back hundreds of years, she also has ancestors from France and probably the Netherlands. A big chunk of my heritage ties to England, with some German limbs on both sides of my family, but I’ve Irish ancestors and probably some Scots in the mix. It may once have been us against them, but go back far enough and you find more “us” than “them.”
History shows how often we forget this. The English set themselves up as better than the Irish and the French and warred often to prove their superiority, but for awhile, they all came to America looking for something different from their homelands – less strife, more opportunity, whatever. If you could reliably trace families’ histories back far enough, you’d probably find some ancient ties of family or friendship.
And our complex family histories have produced a nation and a world with a complex history, one we’d do well to discover.
My family did not talk much about their heritage when I was growing up, and I admit that I had little curiosity. My mother had been estranged from her brothers for many years, and for reasons I can’t remember, finally decided to reconnect at the end of my high school years.
I had opportunity to visit a couple of times with my uncle and his wife, mother’s younger brother. What I discovered in those visits was an alternate history to the little I knew from Mother’s rarely shared stories. To be sure, much of the history jibed well enough, but a couple of stories varied significantly, especially the events surrounding the split between our families.
I knew Mother well enough to know she often changed the tale of her past to make her look more favorable and that she was not afraid of recounting incidents I had knowledge of to make for a better story than the historical reality. I expect that happens a lot in families.
Not surprisingly then, my explorations of the immediate past, up through my grandparents' time, gave me some confirmation of her stories and brought to light portions of the past I expect she deliberately hid from me because she found them embarrassing. And I understand that. But I would have been less shocked by those stories than she could have thought. One tale, though, I haven’t really figured out, and because all those who might be able to shed light on it are gone, I’ll never know why she altered the narrative.
This tale is the one where my father’s mother came to America to escape the persecution of Jews in Germany. The tale always implied that her arrival coincided with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Now, that’s when my grandmother applied for and was granted citizenship, so that may be the cause of the confusion. But grandmother came here early in the 1900s, when Germans of all stripes were coming to America. From what I’ve been able to discover, antisemitism was not a prime driver of Jewish immigration at the time, economics was.
I’ve learned that our histories are complicated, and the lore handed down may not always be accurate. And that can lead to bad assumptions. For instance, Sharon’s family has deep Texas ties, going back to the early 1800s. Before that, the family thread developed mostly in the south, going back to the Virginia Colony. My family’s roots tend to be almost exclusively northern in the U.S., and most of the family entered the U.S. as immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I occasionally tease my wife that her family and mine probably fought in the Civil War on opposite sides – and I’ve found evidence of that – and my side won.
Then I discovered she had ancestors from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And though her heritage is solidly English and Irish going back hundreds of years, she also has ancestors from France and probably the Netherlands. A big chunk of my heritage ties to England, with some German limbs on both sides of my family, but I’ve Irish ancestors and probably some Scots in the mix. It may once have been us against them, but go back far enough and you find more “us” than “them.”
History shows how often we forget this. The English set themselves up as better than the Irish and the French and warred often to prove their superiority, but for awhile, they all came to America looking for something different from their homelands – less strife, more opportunity, whatever. If you could reliably trace families’ histories back far enough, you’d probably find some ancient ties of family or friendship.
And our complex family histories have produced a nation and a world with a complex history, one we’d do well to discover.
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