My Search for Ancestors

A Genealogy Series:  (1) An Introduction to my Search for Ancestors

I have always been very interested in family.  I love my close family, those to whom I am joined by birth or marriage, those whom I know intimately.  I would do anything to ensure their security and prosperity.  I love my extended family, the ones whom I have known, with whom I share bonds of heredity or culture or affection.  I would step forward to help aunts or uncles, cousins or in-laws or nephews or nieces.  This isn’t unusual.  Caring about the relatives you know is normal for persons of good faith and compassion.

My interest goes farther.  Beyond those I personally know and care about are other people.  They are cousins of my cousins, brothers and sisters of my uncles and aunts, blood relatives of my step-relatives, and most of all grandparents of my grandparents.  They are the ones who came before, who shaped our lives intentionally or accidentally, who created us a family.  I care about them because they created the people I love, because they established or passed on the values we hold most important, because we share common roots.  I am fascinated with them because in ways that are sometimes subtle but very real, we are all inextricably connected.

My interest in genealogy wasn’t always so mature. 

Being from a strong, well-established, interconnected extended family, I already knew a lot about grandparents and even great-grandparents, even as a child.  When I first began to look beyond the faces I saw, I simply wanted to expand upon this.  I wanted to know who my great-great grandparents were, where they had lived, what they had done. 

My cousin Mike, always more professional about his genealogical research than I, helped me establish a foundation of essential information to build upon.  I began collecting as much objective information as possible.  I developed an affinity for names and dates.  It became a game of how many birthdates I could gather and how many family tree diagrams I could complete. 

But I was collecting statistics without much context.  It wasn’t long before I began to want more.  I began to seek out connections to people I knew something about.  Translation:  I began to search for connections to famous or influential persons.   That was fun for a while.

Once I had established some impressive connections to some very well-know celebrities who also happened to be cousins, my next challenge was to push the historical boundaries.  I began to dig deeper and deeper into the past, seeking to find the most ancient connections possible.  This enhanced my feeling of connectedness to the great stage of history.  Once I had gone more than a couple of centuries into the past, I began an attempt to combine this exploration with my earlier celebrity search.  There was a sort of a ‘Holy Grail,’ although I didn’t realize it almost until I had found it. But eventually, I did find a demonstrable connection to royalty.  It was kind of exciting to claim direct descent from a king.

At some point, though, I had to admit that the ancient connections were little more than a trivia game.  Truthfully, how much of a connection could it be when there are 20 generations between you and your distant ancestor?  When I realized that the genealogical component of my DNA that had been provided by that King was about one-millionth of my genetic heritage, I realized that even though yes, I am descended from a king, his influence, whether genetically or as a patriarch, is pretty much negligible.

That is when my genealogical interest began to mature.  I began to find myself less interested in the famous or the extremely ancient, less interested in objective information like birth certificates or wedding dates or name spellings, and more interested in the personalities, the motivations, characteristics, and experiences of my ancestors and other relatives.  I began to seek the family that was near enough to feel familiar, far enough to be enlightening when discovered.  I began to look for context to go with names and dates and places.  I began to search for the rare and wonderful stories of the people who “created” me and my family. 

Of course I still needed to search for names, dates, and places, to some extent.  The difference was that I began to pay much more attention to the world my forbearers inhabited, their interactions with it, the setting within which they lived their lives. 

As a history teacher I tell students that the most fascinating academic subject is history, because it is the stories of people who came before us, who with their lives experienced the world they lived in and shaped the world we live in.  I applied that way of thinking to my family history.  I began to seek out connections to people whom I could get to know, so to speak. My search was no more just an attempt to collect names and dates associated with my great-grandparents.  It became an attempt to understand them.  I began to collect knowledge about their historical context, the communities where they lived, what they did to make a living,  their personal characteristics, their values, what motivated them.  I looked for their personalities and whenever possible, their stories.  No longer just names on a family tree, I began to build a personal connection to these grandparents, cousins, and other relatives.

Some to whom I felt a strong connection did live quite a long time ago.  I identified strongly with a few who lived as much as four or five centuries ago, because of unique circumstances in their lives or their personalities which helped me to understand them and relate to them as individuals. 

The most significant discoveries, though, were the connections I found to those who lived just “beyond the edges” of my family’s collective memory.  These are the ones whose names we might have forgotten, but who nevertheless are a lot like us.  They are the ones who might have lived a family life similar to our own, who might have experienced or explained the world in ways that we would find familiar, with whom we might share a subtle physical resemblance.  These are the ones who might have been remembered by my great-grandparents, who forgot to pass their stories along to a later generation.  These are the ones who are just far enough removed that, even though we have lost track of them, if we ever had a magical opportunity to meet them we might still think of each other as “family.”

I hope to write a few stories about my people.  Some will be from a century or two ago.  Some will be from the family I have known personally in my lifetime.  Later, I might even write a few about myself – the kind of stories I imagine a descendant a century from now might be pleased to discover.  Stories of my people.

Feel free to share your stories of family history here on the Gryphem blog, too.

Gryphem