What we find can offer strength, connection, and purpose.
He approached me from the back of the library, hands in his pockets and eyes cast downward. I wasn’t sure if he was the guy I was meeting with today; we had only met once. He shuffled toward me; I said his name, and he nodded but stayed awkwardly away.
He said he wanted to know more about what I was offering and how it would work. His demeanor did not match the person I spoke to on the phone days earlier. I told him I was your average family history nut and wanted to help him digitize the documents he had found— as we had discussed over the weekend.
“I thought you were bringing your mom’s papers? Did you bring any of the things you found?”
“Never mind- I don’t want to waste your time when nobody is interested in what we find.”
Ahhhh. Isn’t that the plight of family historians everywhere? If I had a nickel for every time I watched someone’s eyes glaze over when I talked about something I found! My own sister used to say, “You can tell me TWO things you have found.”
It can feel lonely caring so deeply about our family tree.
Connecting piece after piece of the family puzzle means a lot to me. In fact, I’m not sure I should admit how much it occupies my thoughts.
When I was a small child, I begged my grandmother to tell me stories about growing up with eight sisters, living on a farm as a young bride, and my mom playing the flute in the marching band. Looking back, I suspect she had a stash of stories that were favorites for us both, and it didn’t matter that I had heard them before. The faraway look in her eyes piqued my curiosity.
She was seeing her stories as she told them, and I wanted to be sure I could do that one day, too.
At 8, I had a strange sense that I had to be more observant than anyone else in my young life. Recalling details forgotten by others gave me enormous pride. I had a cassette tape recorder with a microphone I carried around. I imagined that I was responsible for capturing overlooked sounds. What if the way the floor creaked or the sound of the magnolia leaves falling were lost forever?
Clearly, I am a documentarian at heart. My reverence for family stories also greatly influenced my interest in photography.
It blows my mind that the snap of a camera can freeze a fleeting instant in time.
I can imagine so much around the preserved moment when I look at our family collection of tin types, daguerreotypes, carte de visite, and old black-and-white snapshots. Doesn’t everyone have experience taking or being in a group photo? I relish the small details and the universality of the experience.
For her portrait, I wonder if Dora Gwinn wanted to hold her riding crop or if her mother made her. Did Allie and Minnie scheme to wear matching dresses in their picture?
The last time we took a family photo, my brother lost his patience (big surprise). It is a ritual for many of us. To me, it is an essential one. My brother? Not so much. Kyle, the lucky non-family member behind the camera, kept snapping anyway. In all our family glory, you can see me scowling and pointing at him to “get back in the shot!”
It’s simple: we were all together, therefore, posed for a picture.
I smiled at my acquaintance in the library and said, “I thought YOU were interested.”
He pulled up a chair and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, maybe my daughter will be. I only spoke to my sons.” I asked him if he had any grandchildren, and he nodded. “There you go! I can’t believe my grandmother’s research papers safely made it into my hands. She couldn’t know I would grow up to be this interested in genealogy.”
He decided to go out to his truck and get the research his mother had done in the 1990s. We worked together for a couple of hours. When we stopped, I told him that all we had done was honor his mother’s efforts by transferring her handwritten information into a format that would be easier to read and preserve.
He was pleased and proudly said, “She did it all by hand through word of mouth. She didn’t have all this computer stuff— she wrote to people, and anytime somebody in the family came through town, she was right there asking them things about the old folks.”
Thank goodness she did.
Working on my family tree has meant different things to me at various times. I got married and moved across the country the same year my story-telling grandmother died. I connected with my mom over our discoveries and questions when she was also in transition with an empty nest and no mother of her own.
My husband’s family had come from Ireland, and I gained a sense of belonging by working on the branch of my tree that had also come from there.
Then, decades later, when my husband died, I discovered that the same grandmother had been my age when her husband died. That my daughter was the same age as my mother, and my son the same age as my father-in-law when they lost their fathers. Knowing these similarities gave me inexplicable strength.*
If they overcame gut-wrenching loss, maybe the kids and I will eventually be okay, too. I focused my work on finding loss and grief in my tree, and assuming my place among so many widows empowered me.
I didn’t feel so alone, and it gave me a way to have more faith in myself.
Eventually, after I decided to sell the house in New Jersey where we had raised our children, I turned my attention to transcribing the “Kansas letters.” Those letters written between brothers in the late 1800s are full of risk, loss, community, and adventure. I believed in my resilience, and my ancestors fortified me.
I can’t explain the depth of my connection to the family I never knew. Still, I accept the perspective gained when exploring their challenges. Could there be an emotional imprint on my DNA from my ancestors? I’m not sure, but knowing that scientists have studied the possibility is fascinating.
For whatever reason, I have always been aware of my small self in the extended scope of the space-time continuum. Not in a negative way that makes it all seem futile. Instead, I feel and cherish the weight and gravity of every individual on all of our family trees as a complete and dimensional life lived.
I do the work for myself, and for a future believer I will never meet.
Below is an excellent keynote address on the topic from the founder of StoryCorps. He discusses the heartfelt act of listening to each other.
*Read more about this discovery in my post,
Age, Loss, and Strength in the Numbers Game.
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