By Janet Curley

Thank you to everyone who participated in my poll this past week. The most selected answer so far is “I bring my family history to future generations”, followed closely by “I see my place in history” . I wrote this post before implementing the poll and will share it with you now. The poll is still open, so fee free to participate if you haven’t already!

The other day my career coach asked me an obvious yet important question. Why is genealogy meaningful to me? It was a different question than why I enjoy doing genealogy. I love the thrill of the hunt and the mysteries that keep evolving. I love finding that piece of evidence that opens up the next door of exploration. That answer is easy.
I admit I was a bit stumped by this question. I came up with the notion of feeling connected – to my family, my community, to history, etc. All true, but a bit flimsy really. Why is genealogy meaningful to anyone? Who cares what happened to our ancestors, dead and gone? Many people want to pass along their family history to their children so they will know where they came from and hopefully pass it along to the generations that follow. I don’t have children, so it is not about giving this gift to them.
Perhaps it is precisely because I don’t have children that it is meaningful to me. I feel I owe my ancestors my own remembrance of them. There won’t be anyone who will ask much about them when I am gone. Having the tree and learning their stories are ways I can honor them. It may be a way I am also remembered. Maybe this is why maiden aunts in our families are often the family historians. Some people contribute to the future with children, some with knowledge of the past and some overachievers do both!
In every tree, there are people who are largely forgotten in time. Their lives and life lessons are no longer available to us. And yet their lessons do come down to us by our parents and grandparents. One way or another they pass those lessons along. How they came to those lessons is the mystery. Finding the context of their lives can often illuminate how our families come to be the way they are. Sometimes it can change how we view our own identity. When watching the show on TV – “Who do you think you are?”, it is fascinating to me to watch these celebrities come to a different notion of who they are based on the life or lives of ancestors from over one hundred years ago. You can see them try to absorb the new information. And what do they all do? They return home with their new family stories and begin to tell the rest of the clan. Some stories resonate with long forgotten truths. Some are welcomed and some are resisted. And each member takes something different with them as a result.
I know my identity now has shifted since I started this journey. I feel much more grounded in the history of my home town and Ireland. Just ask my partner how much Irish stuff has mushroomed in the house over the past couple of years. It is about feeling more connected, but also not as simplistic as that. Genealogy is meaningful to me because of what it teaches me about myself. What is handed down to me and why? And what has manifested itself in me from generations past?
Thanks to Val for asking me the question and to all of you for joining me in thinking about the answer.

by Janet Curley

Is it okay to try to create family stories about people who lived more than a hundred years ago? What do I really know about them? Nothing…But I always start telling myself stories as I come across new pieces of information. I wonder sometimes if this is fair to them, or to me for that matter.

In my career as a therapist, the past and family stories were critically important in helping someone make sense of their present circumstances. A focus in therapy is to help patients understand the nature of their relationships with their family of origin. Who were the people who nurtured them? Who were the people who challenged them? Who were the people who hurt them? Who were the people they could count on? And who amongst all those people did they most identify with or have the closest ties to? If our emotional ties are strongest with the people who hurt us, we are likely to remain in pain and struggle with our relationship with others. If our ties are with those who nurtured us and who truly helped us to become healthy adults, we are likely to have more satisfying lives and loves. Of course it is never that simple and the emotional ties are tangled and complicated. Hence, we can easily spend years trying to untangle the Irish knot that was created before we could even walk and talk.

As a genealogist, I often don’t know the stories. And I don’t know where the strongest relationships were. I know the names and dates. I know where and sometimes even how someone lived, but I don’t have their own account of their lives. Who nurtured them? Who challenged them? Who hurt them? Who did they count on? And who did they have the closest ties to? I look for clues among the hidden facts that I find for the emotional decisions. The census reports tell me who lived with who. They tell me what they did for a living and how many children they lost. They tell me when they left their family of origin, the country they knew and threw caution to the wind for new opportunities. All of these facts have emotional decisions associated with them.

I am always trying to put together a family story with all these pieces of information. I can’t help it. After 25 years of helping patients try to make sense of their family ties, I am constantly building relationships between family that I have found but don’t know. I have no idea if my guesses are right or even close.

Of course, the family stories we tell from our own lives are often close to fiction. What a child understands about their parents’ motivations is often flawed and incomplete. We carry those ideas into adulthood and they affect our relationships with our parents until we become parents and begin to understand why they might have done what they did. Sometimes we never get to that understanding. So if the stories we tell ourselves about living relatives are guesses at best, then why can’t we develop stories about our ancestors long dead? Without the emotional baggage, perhaps the stories are more accurate? Yet I know it is impossible to look down a long telescope without our own lenses, without our own assumptions.

As a therapist, one of the lessons I learned early was not to assume I knew how someone felt about their relationships. A patient could recoil from a loving relationship and remain loyal to a harmful one. A parent’s love could be smothering and their abandonment could be the best thing for their child. I had to hear about the tangled web of emotional ties before I could really understand why my patient was there in front of me suffering because those ties were in a strangling and paralyzing knot. I will never be able to do that with my silent ancestors. I will never hear about their contradictory relationships or what parts of their lives meant the most to them.

I can only create my own flawed and incomplete stories with the innocent understanding of a genealogist trying to know her family. I suppose this is as good as it gets for anyone trying to understand their family, living or dead. And I believe that most of us can’t really help ourselves. The stories will develop whether we wish them to or (k)not.