March 7, 2011

• Who do you think you are…and why should you care?

  Reality shows are positively taking over the airways. Since that long-ago premiere episode of “Survivor,” which seemed so unusual and unlikely a topic for a television series, we’ve moved on to being able to choose from a veritable smorgasbord of people who seek the limelight. Want to peek in the window and see how the worst sort of hoarders live? Or suffer along with parents trying to juggle six toddlers going through the terrible twos, all screaming at once? How about witnessing the incredible angst of being so young, beautiful and rich that everyone is envious of you? Bless their hearts, life is challenging, and they just have to say those bad words. Then there are those folks who are fatally attracted to animals. Some….no, a lot of this stuff is just plain weird. Wannabe tycoons will seemingly do anything for power…or is it seeing themselves on television that is the real attraction? Large-size people suddenly don’t mind taking off their clothes for the camera, showing us way more than we wanted to know about how much weight they need to lose….in the next 16 weeks. Right. Honestly, it seems like there is no dignity left when dollars are dangled in front of these….participants.

  I sound like I know what I’m talking about, but the truth is I’ve never watched a whole episode of any of those shows. Never watched Survivor or Kate and her bunch, with or without Jon, never stepped on the scales with the losers, never gagged at the squalor people choose to reveal inside their homes, don’t really care about the guy with 16 wives or the folks with 30 kids. This stuff they call “reality” just does not feel like entertainment to me.

  But someone has finally come up with one reality show that has me hooked, but good. On Friday nights at 7:00 p.m., I’m glued to the television, watching celebrities find out fascinating things about their heritage on the show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” It’s not the celebrities who are the attraction for me; although they’ve chosen to highlight people who are popular and interesting, it could be any ordinary Tom, Dick or Mary on there as far as I’m concerned. I’m watching to see how they do it and what they discover because I want to do it, too!

                    

  It’s sort of ironic that new technology (zoom to the future) has revolutionized the ways in which we can find out about history (blast to the past). The show is sponsored by Ancestry.com, a web-business that allows its members to access its wealth of online records about the past. Census data, birth, marriage and death records, military service and immigration information–all these are some of the collections available, and they can literally be at your fingertips. Where once it required a trip to a musty courthouse basement to find a heavy tome filled with a county’s homestead records, now one can simply type into a search engine and in a matter of seconds know that one’s great-great-grandfather proved up 160 acres and had a document signed by someone like Theodore Roosevelt or James Buchanan to show for it. Heady stuff.

                     

  But why bother? Who cares about a great-great-grandmother who bore seven children and died when the eighth was born? Or about an uncle who shouldered a musket in a long-ago tragic war? Why would anyone want to understand the rationale behind leaving the comfort and security of home to head west in search of riches in the gold fields–or just a new life? Can we understand, in the midst of living in the twenty-first century, what it was like to be a pioneer…when western Missouri was the western frontier?

                   

  For me, it started with an envelope. A scrap of paper that my dad’s cousin picked up, in answer to my naive question, “Do you know anything about our family’s history?” He smiled and on the back of that used envelope began to sketch out for me a simple graph of our shared family line. He started with his mother and my grandad, who were brother and sister, and then he added their parents, and then their parents, and on back and farther back–and suddenly it was a little tree with roots reaching all the way to the American Revolution. My family tree. And it had names on it–magical sounding names that belonged to my people. I wondered about them from that moment on. I wanted to know them.

                

  Why did my great-grandfather choose to become a printer? Did he, like me, love words? What was it like for his father, a doctor ministering to Union soldiers in the Civil War, to move from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri? Did it seem that he had left real civilization behind? Who was the woman behind the haunting eyes in the faded photograph of my great-great-grandmother? She inspired me to give my daughter her name, even though I never knew her. Could I know more about her than the fact that she was pretty, even in old age?

                

  These are all questions I want to answer, but still the bigger question remains: Why? What does it matter? I think it matters because very often who we are is influenced by who they were. I do not think it is an accident that my father-in-law loved his work. When I talked with him about his predecessors, I learned that his father and grandfather before him were also well known as hard workers, men who took great pride in the work of their hands and found satisfaction in the fruits of their labors. I do not think it is by happenstance that my daughter devotes herself so fully to her job as a teacher, a role in which she thrives; although she never knew them, several of her great-grandparents and grandparents were well-respected educators. And when I kneel down to plant seeds in the ground or take up a start of heirloom peonies from an old, abandoned houseplace, I can almost feel my granny looking over my shoulder, encouraging me to not set them too deep–or to tamp the soil down just so. She never said that me during her lifetime; I just know it.

                   

  People argue over which is more influential–genetics or environment. Those who are strictly scientific might say that the behaviors I’ve described are learned, rather than transmitted through the genes. But I don’t buy that. If scientists can prove that people are genetically predisposed to certain negative things, then surely the same can be true of the positives. I just know…in my blood…that Granny gave me her love for gardening and growing things. I know that my husband’s love of agriculture is a part of him, as much as his dark hair and large hands. And this is why we live the life we do today, pure and simple. 

               

  Genealogy is about blood–and it gets in your blood. Finding out about one’s ancestors allows you to solve mysteries, put together puzzles, and have the satisfaction of filling in the blanks. Sometimes you search and dig and look high and low and finally must accept that there are unanswerable questions, puzzle pieces that don’t fit or mysteries that, at the end of the day, must remain unsolved. Not every clue leads to a solution, and sometimes fiction is clothed as fact, leading the searcher far astray. Nevertheless, once begun, this journey cannot be abandoned. One does not give up, and I’ll probably go to my grave wondering…still wondering…was that James Taber the one I think he was? And if he was, whatever happened to him? Why does he simply disappear from the face of the earth? Is there one more little thing I’ve overlooked, one more land record I could find or spelling of his name that I could try. Perhaps if I go back to Forsyth, to the genealogy room in their library, and look through the old newspapers once again I will find something… that one little something….

  • 9:40 am
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