Genealogical Epiphany

Every family has a different sense of who their “relatives” are. Some families embrace nearly every far flung in-law as a “cousin” while other families are more particular about who they allow to claim a branch of their family tree. I had an interest in genealogy and family history from a young age and can recall asking my grandparents who their parents were, what their names were, where they were buried, etc. My grandparents’ surnames are Otto, Huffman, Creighton and McDowell, and I grew up with a firm sense of how these branches attached to our family tree. Our family is fairly small, even back through my grandparents’ generation, so we weren’t one of those families who had “cousins” to spare. I can recall that whenever we’d encounter a local with the surname of Otto or Huffman we’d declare that they mustn’t be any relative of ours or we’d know who they were. This sentiment wasn’t born out of any sense of genetic superiority, but more perhaps from a naiveté of how prolific our ancestors had been and how long their descendants remained in our home county.

During my high school years I completing a family tree chart that included all 16 of my great-great grandparents. Even after this project I tended to think of our family tree as having four main branches, one for each of my grandparents. Ancestors beyond these were, for me, lost in the ancestral mist, very far removed from the familiar branches of my tree I was used to hearing about.

This changed last year when my Mom asked me to go through an old chest of family things she got from my granddad's house after he passed away. Inside this trunk of old family papers and pictures was a genealogist's dream--a family history written by my great grandmother Huffman. Additionally, there was a picture of my 3rd great grandparents Thomas. It struck me that my great grandmother Huffman had labeled this picture "our grandfather John Thomas." Obviously any grandparents of hers would be direct ancestors of mine, but these great-great-great grandparents were far, far away from the branches of my family tree I was familiar with.

Think of your ancestors as the trunk of the family tree and yourself as a branch further on up. You’re familiar with all the nearby branches you can see: parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. You might have some sense of branches that are further away from you, closer to the trunk of the tree: great-grandparents and great-great grandparents. Any branches further away than these are usually obscured from our sight by all the leaves and branches in between; we know that more distant branches, and ultimately the trunk, are there, but we never give it any thought. So, being out on a branch of the tree and looking down we lose our sense of where we came from.

Now consider our ancestors’ perspective (which will someday be our own as our descendants multiply and add branches to the tree). Looking up from the trunk, we may not be able to see every branch and twig of the tree. Seen or unseen though, we know that every branch of the tree emanates from us and is an extended part of us. Considering my ancestors’ perspective is what caused me to experience my genealogical epiphany: every direct ancestor is a grandparent even if they’re on a distant, unfamiliar branch further down the tree. Put another way, would you ever consider your great-grand children as not being “yours” simply because they’re a few generations down the line? Of course not, and the same holds true when we look back up the line at our great-grand parents. It’s often the case that we never get to meet our great-grandparents--let alone great-great grandparents--and this lack of a face-to-face, direct reference is what adds to the genealogical mist between us and them.

Another part of my epiphany was the recognition of our female ancestors’ equal place in our genealogy. Women usually change their surname when they marry, making their ancestors harder to find later on. But while the names might change, the blood never does. We’ve got just as much of our grandmother’s blood in us as we do our grandfather’s. And while we might consider that the blood “thins” as it gets mixed making its way down through the generations, your fourth great grandmother is just as much your ancestor as is her husband, your fourth great grandfather.

Again, this may seem obvious to some. But recall my point about surnames above: it’s a lot easier to trace a male’s ancestry than a female’s. Add to this the fact that our society is patrilineal, meaning that we trace our ancestry through our father's line (Jewish culture, on the other hand, is matrilineal because they trace their ancestry through their mother's line of descent).

We might have certain social, cultural or familial perspectives regarding our genealogy, but perspective doesn’t change our blood. Thanks to my genealogical epiphany I now consider my direct ancestors as grandparents in my direct bloodline and not as distant relatives whose importance has been washed away by the procession of generations or the changing of names.

A Trunk Full Of Dead Relatives

Every genealogist has a dream about finding the proverbial trunk in the attic that is chock full of genealogical treasures: photo albums, family Bibles, newspaper clippings, vital records, and so on. I can proudly say that I am one of the fortunate few who have, more or less, made such a discovery. Perhaps it’s more proper to say that my Mom made the discovery in the upstairs of my Grandad’s house after he passed away in 1991. She and my aunt sorted through it to some degree, then Mom took the trunk (more properly a metal footlocker) and put it in my old bedroom at her house for safe keeping.

I was back in Ohio for a week when my Grandpa Otto passed away in January 2005 when Mom asked if I’d help her go through some old family things. She hauled out the trunk and we proceeded to sift through its contents. The greatest gem of all was a handwritten family history which went back as far as my 4th great-grandfather Thomas. The second greatest gem was a labeled picture of my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas and his wife. Other treasures included my great-grandmother Creighton’s Bible (filled with obituaries of family members) and pictures of my great grandparents Huffman and Creighton. I made scans of the written family history and most of the family photos we found (nearly all of them unlabeled) to take back with me to Oregon.

As a teenager I had done some genealogical work. I took genealogy as a 4-H project one year, and my research had me thumbing through dusty ledgers at the county courthouse, hoping to find the names of great-grandparents’ parents and thus adding another generation to my family tree chart. To this day I still have my cryptic, chicken-scratched notes on high school notebook paper and the family tree chart which was the culmination of the 4-H project.

I drifted away from genealogy shortly thereafter, though my interest in family history never went away. Finding my great-grandmother Huffman’s handwritten family history of her Thomas ancestors re-whetted my desire to push back the murky veil of generations past and discover forgotten branches of my family tree. My research had never taken me as far back as these Thomases, nor the Wiseley line they married into. I had once again been bitten by the genealogy bug and I’ve been off and running ever since.

After I got back home to Oregon I looked over my old high school notes to re-familiarize myself with the branches of my family tree and how they all connected. Then I got some genealogy software and started filling in boxes with names and dates. I immediately noted that computers, genealogy software and the Internet were a much more efficient way of doing genealogy than paging through dusty ledgers and drawing tree charts with a ruler. But there could be no replacing these ledgers, nor a much faded picture labeled in pencil nor a family history, hand written on scraps of typing paper. Were it not for these primary sources there would be very little information to post on the Internet or enter into the genealogy software.

When my folks drove out from Ohio the following summer I asked them to bring the trunk with them since Mom didn’t really want it and I knew my research would lead me to sift through it again, many times, more carefully. When I talked to my Dad on the phone shortly before their departure from Ohio he told me that he’d loaded “the trunk of dead relatives” into the back of the pick-up truck. The trunk had been christened, and it was forevermore referred to by its new, colorful moniker.