Sarah Gibbard Cook
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
  • Contact

For Love of Family Trees

11/13/2017

12 Comments

 
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.

While we can't claim credit — or shame — from our ancestors' achievements or mistakes, we ARE the end result of their actions and decisions.

Reply
Sarah link
11/13/2017 11:54:04 am

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.

I'm fascinated by the difference between your reaction and your friend's on learning DNA results. Our DNA shows BOTH how connected we are to such multitudes and how distinct each of us is from anyone but an identical twin.

Reply
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.

I'm so thankful that you instilled the idea for me to have the test.

I think all full sibs are as much the same as identical twins, in the regard of having identical lineage (if not DNA). What matters is if the sibs care or not. Mine do not, so they aren't the same as me. :)

Reply
Sarah link
11/13/2017 11:06:31 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.

Reply
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.

Reply
Sarah link
11/14/2017 09:26:07 am

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).

Reply
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?

Love the mixed metaphors. :)

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.

Sarah, I really like your verbiage here. I believe many of us have pondered at one time or another "Who am I?"

With so many wars that have taken place in many countries during the many centuries, we could acturally be one thing through genealogical research (church records, etc.) and another thing when we consider the mass rapes that took place during those wars. Europe has experienced so many wars that left behind massive devestation. What if I were a German woman who was raped by one of the invading armies during the Thirty Years War? Maybe I was married to my German husband at the time of my rape. Yet the church book on births would show that my husband Johann Heinrich as the father, when possibly he was not.

At what point today may we determine who we are? DNA testing is probably a valuable tool. But how should we be judged? I spent some 35 years researching my Hassenpflug family name through German records in Germany. And perhaps DNA would bring me a big disappointment.

It is lineage, heritage and DNA - for sure. And we must leave it at that. I am happy with the German chuch records back into the 1500s and 1600s. Then there are the factors resulting from my mother's WASP from England. I am who I am, whatever that might mean. I am happy to be alive, healthy, productive as a former educator, as a husband, as a father, etc.

Sarah, as usual, you manage to stimulate our brains!

Reply
Sarah link
11/16/2017 12:12:42 am

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.

"Who am I?" may be a nearly universal question, which can be approached from so many angles, some of them unrelated to ancestry. I know people who might seek their answers in religion, or vocation, or parenting role, or astrological signs.

Reply
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.)

But you know, now that I yet again read the words highlighted in Sarah's response, I realized that I've always been unable to apply that question to me and my research. I've just never resonated with that instinct (in this context). My reason for researching my family lineage or having my DNA done has never been to answer the question, "Who am I?" My question has always been, "Who were THEY?"

Therefore, I have no trouble reconciling my DNA with my research. In a way, the National Geographic DNA test tells an even more exciting story, or ... how can I say ... makes me feel more connected to broader world history. My unexpectedly high percentage of Eastern European DNA isn't indicated by the genealogy research I've done back to the 1700s on most lines. Makes me wonder what they were up to in the 1600s that I don't know about. :) And I love it!

Reply
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!

Reply
Lisa
11/16/2017 10:30:54 am

:)

It will definitely be a work for MY whole lifetime.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016

    RSS Feed


      ​get updates

    Sign up
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
  • Contact