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Original historical research enthralls few besides professional historians, with one huge exception: family history. Genealogy is said to be the second most popular hobby in the United States, after gardening.
The desire to trace ancestry goes back millennia. Biblical lists detail generations of who begat whom. Family history has taken on new life with the expansion of retirement leisure; the computerization of vital records; the availability of DNA analysis; and disconnection from close-knit communities of kin. Like any passionate research, genealogy offers the adventure of discovery. It’s exciting to dig out pieces of a puzzle and assemble them into an ever-growing story or picture. History provides an opening into distant times and cultures. Family history has the added draw of personal connection. It helps answer "Who am I?" and "Where do I fit in?" Serious genealogists may trace every branch with equal vigor, but most of us pick and choose. Of my sixteen great-great-grandparents, only one was born a Gibbard, but that's who I mean when I say I’m descended from English bakers. Why take pride or identify more with one than another? Professor Henry Louis Gates of PBS’s Finding Your Roots says descendants of slaveholders needn’t feel ashamed; guilt isn’t hereditary. By the same token, while learning about our ancestors can help us understand ourselves, we can’t justly claim credit for their achievements.
12 Comments
Lisa
11/13/2017 08:44:43 am
Sarah, you are descended from English bakers, and 15 additional people. :) I definitely have some ancestors who are more compelling or interesting to me, or whom I feel more of a connection with, than others, but I research all lines as I can. When one friend got her DNA results (she sent in her spit as soon as ancestry.com started offering the service), she suddenly felt a connection to the complete caucasian human race (she discovered she's one of the whitest white people on earth). When I got my DNA results from NG, I felt the opposite. I felt more unique than ever.
Yes, we're the end result of them all, in random proportions depending which genes we got - and non-random proportions culturally, depending which traditions our ancestral families decided to carry on.
Lisa
11/13/2017 12:34:23 pm
Hmmm. RE: My friend's reaction vs mine. It must have to do with the point in our lives/research when we had the DNA tested. I had researched my genealogy for 35 years by that time, and yet the deep NG test results widened my horizons by introducing me to some genes I did not realize I had, and I discovered that my farther-back, undocumented but still individual ancestors mixed it up in ways I didn't know about. So I felt more connected to long-ago individuals, whose names I will never know. But I can see them out there in the mists now. I now feel like I am ... a more deliberate result of all this history. Ergo, more unique. She hasn't been doing genealogy for long, has all immigrant grandparents and g-grandparents. Somehow, for her, although her ancestry DNA results didn't contradict what she already knew, I guess she suddenly realized that she shares DNA with a much larger society than she'd thought about. So there's lineage or ancestry, and there's DNA, and there's heritage. Three different things, interconnected but with three different kinds of significance. All contributing to helping answer the question "Who am I?" And that's even before all the experiences and choices we factor in after we're born. Trying to sort it all out could be the work of a lifetime.
Lisa
11/14/2017 08:30:34 am
Yes, three different parts. We all feel their relative importance in different measure. Lineage: I have a friend who's been doing her genealogy for 35 years, but she didn't really know until about 3 years ago that her grandmother was Norwegian. **How can that be, that she totally ignored this one grandparent, to the point that she didn't know that woman's parents but can take another line back to the early 1600s in North America?** Heritage: Some of my cousins love to wave the blue and yellow flag but know nothing about Sweden – then or now. DNA: Well, I explained my own interest in that above. It tells the Rest of the Story. I think you should combine all of it to come up with the most robust picture of an individual or family. But yet, in the end, we all write our OWN story, don't we? :) We flesh out the story to suit ourselves. To mix the metaphor, we each design and piece our own quilt out of the pieces we've been given or seek out. Lineage, heritage, and DNA all provide some of the pieces. So do the things that affect us in our lifetimes, chosen or unchosen. As for our own story, it's not just our biography but how we interpret it. Rich life? Rough life? Depends on the lenses you're looking through (just to run wild with the metaphors).
Lisa
11/14/2017 12:13:49 pm
As our mutual friend suggested in her article, is this interest ultimately a sequence in our DNA which gets turned on, or not?
Walter Hassenpflug
11/15/2017 07:30:04 pm
So there's lineage or ancestry, and there's DNA, and there's heritage. Three different things, interconnected but with three different kinds of significance. All contributing to helping answer the question "Who am I?" And that's even before all the experiences and choices we factor in after we're born. Trying to sort it all out could be the work of a lifetime.
Walter, good point about rape and similar effects on DNA of which we have no record. Probably a large proportion of African Americans today have DNA from white slaveholders that would never have been acknowledged, part of their lineage but not heritage. Some adults who were adopted as infants feel a strong need to find out about their birth parents (or at least their birth mother) while others say they don't need to, the parents who raised them are what count - heritage and not DNA.
Lisa
11/16/2017 09:12:09 am
Walter, I always say that all it takes is one rape or one illicit affair — or one sudden albeit poorly thought out decision — for our DNA to go sideways. (Not even bringing up the "switched at birth" scenario.)
Walter Hassenpflug
11/16/2017 10:20:18 am
Thank you Sarah and thank you Lisa for the wonderful responses to my verbiage. An interesting question of not so much who we are, but who were they? Lots of GREAT thinking on both your parts. Again, Sarah, you come up with some fabulous blogs. These should lessen my chances of getting Alzheimers!
Lisa
11/16/2017 10:30:54 am
:) Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin.
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