Connections

August 10, 2020

As we looked for things to do while stranded at home this spring, Sandy found under a pile of papers the kit she had purchased from Ancestry.com, one of the companies that will research your family tree. She stays close in touch with family members in the old hometown, or home county. Family ties are big for her.

She bought the kit two years ago then forgot about it. I guess it doesn’t matter when you get around to researching your dead relatives. Nothing’s going to change for them.

You’ve seen the ads on TV. You send in a saliva sample. In six to eight weeks the company gives you a report on your national origins. You get on the internet, enter family names, and you get more names. You can pursue it further if you’re interested. I guess it’s fun if you find you’re related to the Rockefellers or Mellons or Great Britain’s Windsors. They didn’t show up for Sandy, though. Her report was close to what she expected: English, Irish, and Scottish, but then also an odd dose of Swedish (Who in heck was Sven?).

Some family trees, I’m sure, are fascinating, populated with great saints or sinners, governors, business titans, movie stars. We all come from families who came from all over. Americans trace their ancestry to every continent. I’ve read that some revelations can be awkward, say, if you find your parents aren’t really your parents, or you’re related to the Lindbergh baby kidnapper. Still, somebody’s great-great-great-etc. came over on the Mayflower.

Not mine. I’ve never looked very far back. I think most of my people arrived in the New York City area sometime in the mid- to late-1800s, most likely with the influx of Irish after the potato famine.  They pretty much stayed around there until my parents’ generation. People who grow up in or around New York consider the rest of the country an alien world, another planet. When I was three my parents moved from Manhattan to the New Jersey suburbs. After my father passed, my mother purchased an empty lot in the Bronx so she could own a piece of New York. In the early Sixties an uncle and aunt on my mother’s side shocked everyone when they pulled up stakes after their wedding and moved to California. My uncle is still out there.

The lives of families and how they’re remembered in genealogy don’t tell whole stories, but they hint at them. The lyrical Southern writer Peter Taylor’s In the Tennessee Country tells an evocative, painful story of three generations of a well-off Memphis family paralyzed by conflict over an elderly parent’s decline. Taylor isn’t unique. Libraries have been written about the power of family ties.

Family trees are linked to and actually help create the nation’s history. Sandy’s dad’s ancestors settled in southern middle Tennessee in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, after transiting the Carolinas and the Appalachians with thousands of other Irish-Scotch immigrants. They farmed and worked at small businesses. They built and ran the railroads that transported farm products for export to generate revenue for the Confederacy, and food and supplies for the rebel armies.

Some in Sandy’s family say her great-great-great grandfather on her mom’s side owned slaves. Her maternal grandfather was born in Mississippi, her maternal grandmother in Tennessee. They settled in Franklin County, Tenn., where Sandy’s mother was born in 1928. During the Depression she, like thousands of other rural Southern kids, quit school to pick cotton. Her parents had three other girls and two boys. They moved to California with the boys. The girls stayed in Tennessee and got married. Eventually the grandparents returned, and today are buried in Cowan in Franklin County, Sandy’s hometown.

With most family trees, the branches can get hazy a few generations back. The courthouse where the records are kept burns down, the family members who paid attention to such things die young or move away and sever ties. People go through hard times. Feuds break out, people nurse grudges, sometimes for decades. Couples get divorced, families break up. Children sometimes are abandoned, sometimes run away and disappear. Folks get in trouble with the law, their stories are hushed up. Families, whether poor, middle class, or affluent, experience heartbreak and grief.

We pursue family connections, or some of us do, for a simple reason. We’re getting older. We want our legacy, our place in history, humble though it may be. We know that we, our spouses, friends, contemporaries, are receding into what our grandkids will think of as the past: first the recent past, when memories still are fresh and the photos still sharp then, as time rolls on, the first outlines of history. We will become what our parents and grandparents and those who came before them are to us right now.

I skim through the old family albums of frayed black-and-white photos and smile at the clothing and hairstyles. We browse through our parents’ wedding album and admire the gents in their suits, bright silk ties and fedoras, the women in their long dresses and stylish hats.

Farther back, the photos become grainier; the expressions and poses more serious, more formal, as the subjects thought of picture-taking as, well, a contribution to history. And that is what it was. Today, kids wave around their cellphones taking pictures of restaurant meals and “posting” them to Instagram.

Let’s hope someone is keeping track of the lineages that will help our kids and grandkids, and their kids and grandkids, to place us in the family tree, to connect us to their own lives, their own experiences and histories. And maybe someday they’ll browse through today’s digitized images of us, smiling next to the Christmas tree, on the beach, at Thanksgiving with the family. The youngest will squint at the photos and ask, “Who’s that?” just as we did. We hope they’ll want to know something about us. It was fun to place names with faces. Maybe it will be for those who come after us.