The Junk and Jewels of Our Ancestors
It's complicated.
Public discourse seems to have devolved into a brawl where often everyone seems to be shouting and no one is listening, kind of like a dysfunctional family. One can point to many reasons: our algorithm driven echo chambers, the crazy rapid pace of change, and all the existential threats to fear. But what if our ancestors are also fighting old arguments through us?
I wonder whether a key to enabling reconnection within our greater national family might begin with a willingness to reassess our individual ancestral stories. If we could look with curiosity, honesty, and openness at our own family stories whatever they might tell us, maybe we could seed our collective story in new ways bringing us together a bit. Perhaps that could sprout the healthier discussions we need so much to navigate our collective predicaments.
The questions “Who are my people?” and “Where do I come from?” are questions we all ask at some point in our lives. We create or are given answers. Those guide our experiences. If our answers become stuck and rigid, then we get what we have now…all shouting, no listening.
I like to consider those questions - who are my people, where do I come from - as a fluid thing, something always growing and evolving. In that inquiry, I just love researching my ‘dead relatives’, finding connections, following story lines, trying to understand what life might have been like for them.
I feel like they are an assembly of hundreds, playing hide and seek with me, sometimes calling out “come find me” sometimes stubbornly hiding in the closet refusing to be found.
The calling feels deep, moving, full of possibilities for retrieving hidden wisdom. The more I explore, the more I find that things from their lives - their beliefs, their traumas, their interests, unexpected events - find expression or repetition through me. It’s almost like some patterns are programed to play out, like they have a life of their own, until they are recognized by someone (me in this case) and addressed or challenged. Things I think are uniquely mine, turn up as patterns from my family’s past or as the unfinished business of someone long dead.
My interest in this started early in life with my dad. Orphaned by his dad and estranged from his mother, he seemed driven to find missing details, trying to understand who he was, trying to resolve the messiness of his childhood pain.
During my childhood summers, we would take family trips to visit relatives, often combined with Dad’s business trips. During these trips we would visit places like Hatcher Valley, Tennessee, or Galena, Kansas, or Ferndale, California. We sat for hours with Uncle Era, a last living relative of founders of Webb City, Missouri. We spent several days with Cousin Jane in Ferndale, California, hearing tales of Dad’s grandparents and their relatives coming to the area before the town was built right after the gold rush. I loved listening to these stories. Cousin Jane gave Dad letters, papers, and some jewelry. Among these was a ring she gave to me. I felt honored; I cherished and wore it throughout my school years. I didn’t know who Cousin Kate was, but I had her ring, a connection to where I come from.
These days, I explore my connections with my ancestors online, using the vast available digital databases[1]. Dad, my brother, and I started building an online family tree before Dad died. We even hired a genealogist to find where his grandfather came from, something that had flummoxed and bothered Dad for years. We gave the genealogist’s results to him as a gift. They were able to trace his grandfather’s family back to England rather than Sweden, a surprise given our Swedish sounding name. Though surprised and probably a bit disappointed to be English when his identity was about being a ‘hardheaded Swede’, Dad also seemed to have a sense of peace and resolution, as did I.
There is something restful about knowing where the home country is and when our people left. A potential opens that I could someday put my feet on homeland soil.
After Dad died, I took over the family account and continued to research. Here’s a bit of what I found. In my family, I have people who fought in the revolutionary war, including some who died. I have relatives who fought on both sides of the Civil War, those who fought to end slavery and preserve the Union and those who fought for the Confederacy or local guerrilla units to keep slavery. Many of those people were enslavers. I have found at least one relative who fought in every war this country has fought through the Vietnam War. That’s a lot of fighting, a lot of war, a lot of suffering.
I knew very little of this until I started looking. Through DNA testing I found that a majority of my ancestors came from Scotland, next England, then Ireland. Contrary to family jokes and lore, according to my genes I have no evidence of Nordic, Native American, or African American heritage (my parents frequently joked about my mother’s artistic tastes coming from her Black ancestors). Thus, I come from white Anglo-Saxon stock, the stereotypical American story with most of my people coming to America in the 1600s, the rest in the early 1800s. Some people had modest means; many were poor. Many came to practice their religions more freely. Most probably came for opportunity and the possibility of a better life. Almost all would become rural people.
Knowing this about my kin, larger implications suggest themselves. What if the big stories, the driving forces within our collective families are microcosms of our national conflict? What if our untended ancestral stories are feeding our cultural discontent? The stories I was taught about the founding of the United States, and how it became what it is today was very sanitized. We were the good guys, always…the super-heroes, no questions asked.
It’s devastating when heroes become just messy humans trying to figure things out. I was nauseated and horrified to find out that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others I had learned to revere as a child were slaveholders. What do we do once we know? Do we deny, do we throw them out, banish the toxic relatives, or might we seek some other way of being with these unwanted truths?
Since childhood, I have felt sickened violence and unfairness. Growing up in the north as a young person, I felt superior because I was taught we were against slavery. We fought the bad thing and won. When I found that I had relatives who enslaved people, I didn’t know what to do with that information. What does it say about me if those are my people, that I come from that? I didn’t cause it, but the actions of my ancestors hang around me like scars, like sticker burs that I just keep spreading about without my knowing. I have the choice to deny or justify. But I am choosing to stay with the discomfort, to learn from it, be with it, to let more of the greater story unfold for me and with my help.
Like many, we had family lore of being part Cherokee. Of course, then we could not part of what happened to the Native People, I thought. Sadly, now I know that’s not true. Finding out I was not Cherokee was the worst part about testing my DNA, because I identified with that heritage. My parents talked about how I had the facial features of my Cherokee ancestors, just like my Aunt Doodle. So, when I learned about the Trail of Tears, of Indian removal policies, I identified with the Native Americans. But my family is just another part of the “we have Cherokee blood” white American mythology. My people were the colonizers; at best, they were complicit with forcing the Native People from their lands, and at worst they were part of the physical and cultural genocide. All the lands my people ever claimed here was taken by force from the Native People. It’s a sad, uncomfortable truth, but now that I know, I can’t not know.
Connecting with my ancestors’ stories in not all shame and dismay. Learning their stories also gives me hope and helps me be more open-hearted, more accepting, more aware of the messiness of the greater human story and how that connects to the messiness of my personal story. The more stories I learn the more I am aware of the fortitude and determination, the hardship and hard work my people endured. They did wonderful things and shameful things, and mostly they did human things, just like I do, just like you do. They lived within their families, found a partner, got married (usually), made love, had children, cared for their families, built things, grieved their losses, participated in the world around them as they found it. Most probably hoped to leave a better world to the next generations. Most probably believed they did.
Our ancestors all have stories, and I am arguing that those stories affect our lives today whether we know them or not. Some of the things they built have made our lives immensely better, more comfortable, more abundant today than theirs were. Our access to information, education, and communication would have been unimaginable to them.
In my research I found that my 3rd great grandfather who immigrated from England at 18 was illiterate. What would that be like, I wondered? Reading is so important to me, supporting my curiosity and hunger to learn, I find it hard to imagine being without it. He couldn’t read, yet he came to this country, set up a blacksmith shop, got married, raised a family, and a two hundred years later, here I am writing to you. There is something mysterious and miraculous in knowing that.
On the other hand, the way my people did things - logging mountaintops, mining, working in tanneries, farming the prairie - caused extensive damage to our environment. Their participation in our wars and oppression, in slavery and genocide, left a legacy of trauma, suffering, and environmental degradation.
It’s all true…the good, the bad, the mundane and the exciting. This as our collective heritage: stories big and small…of electric lights, World Wars, atomic bombs, my grandmother’s cherry pie, and my Cousin Kate’s ring.
When my parents died, I was left the task of going through all the stuff they left, discarding huge amounts of junk, giving away even more. I sorted out treasures to keep and pass on to the next generations. Some of those treasures help me tell these stories.
Likewise, collectively we need to go through the stuff of our country, of our history, of our cultural structures. We have a lot of old beliefs, practices, and structures that need to be discarded or composted. Still others need significant repair, and some treasures deserve to be kept and treasured.
Each of us comes with a unique ancestral story and perspective, the junk and jewels of our family’s house. Rather than fight about whose perspective is right, perhaps we would be wise to discover what we individually were bequeathed, then sort it making our peace with what we’re stuck with and what we’ve been gifted. That peace would be free from justification, denial, and blame. Then we are left with the messy, complicated truth of our shared imperfect, struggling, guessing humanity.
And yet, as I come to know more of my ancestors’ stories, I find myself filled with compassion for them, for myself and for every person alive now. And I find I am grateful. We’ve been through a lot to reach this moment. Let’s be unafraid of our past and tell whole stories as truthfully as we can. I carry one tiny piece of the puzzle. You carry another. We need the wisdom of all our ancestors to guide us through these times we’re in.
And we need to throw away their junk.
[1] We use Ancestry.com which requires a yearly paid subscription. You can also research and build a family tree on FamilySearchwhich is run by the Mormon Church and is available for free.
This is a reflection of what is clearing thorugh me at this time. We are One.....thank you for your story, it is our story