Our Deep Roots

I was up too late last night. I somehow--I don't now remember how--stumbled on online photographs of daguerreotypes of a set of my German great-great-great-grandparents. It was rather a shock seeing the face of an ancestor born in the 18th century. More clicking around brought more photographs, albeit mostly of gravestones, and biographies of other ancestors, and the names and relationships of people I know only from scraps of my father's and his mother's stories.

There were two sad stories in all of that biographical data. The oldest concerned a son of my abovementioned German great+grandparents. Not many years after he arrived in the USA--the family settled in the 1850s--he joined the Union Army and died of pneumonia in the first year of the Civil War. His obituary described the military endeavour he had joined as a Holy Cause.

The other story was the death of illness, at 45, of  my "Irish" great-grandfather. His father was born in Ireland, but his mother was of pioneer stock, and like her he was born in the USA. But one scrap of story I heard from his daughter-in-law (who, of course, never knew him) was that his youngest son, my grandfather, was so poor he got only an orange for Christmas one year. The loss of a father had been an economic, as well as a personal, tragedy.

This story doesn't quite mesh with stories about my grandfather and his older brother wandering into a poorer Irish neighbourhood, much to the disgust of their mother and nanny, but economic ups and downs were not unknown to my family. The Germans had done quite well for themselves in Germany--they emigrated in First Class--and they continued to do quite well in the USA until, ahem, 1929. The Irish--very cleverly, I thought--married into the aforementioned pioneer stock and then into my grandmother's German-American clan.

I went to bed, quite late, thinking about all of these ancestors and their siblings, and I wondered if any of my siblings' descendants will look at a photograph of me in 2200. Perhaps my life will have been colourful enough for one of them to have any interest in it, just as my eye was caught by that young German man who died at Camp Yates.

That's not really important for me, but it might be important for the descendants. I would hate a child of my family to grow up thinking that they sprung, fully formed, from a place of shameful privilege, or that their ancestors were boring and bad. It is much better to have a grasp of the ups and downs in their ancestors' lives, to know that even the times of prosperity brought the heartbreak of loss and that the times of poverty had their good side, too. Apparently my German-American great-grandfather got a job as a travelling salesman after the Crash of '29 and drove up and down his state scattering cigar ash out the window. What a great example.

Then there's Great-Aunt Meta, who had a crush on the Kaiser's brother, making a scene at a Red Cross dinner during the run-up to the American entrance into the First World War because someone insulted the German Royal Family. Imprudence or guts? Whichever, she's certainly someone to remember the next time someone trashes me on Facebook for my lack of Wokeness.

All these wonderful stories that root me in history. And I am just one person. Whole cultures or nations are also rooted into history by stories. It is important to know our stories and to love our ancestors, even if we unearth stories about them that make us uncomfortable. To take Pope Francis' most famous phrase egregiously out of context (as everyone else does), "Who am I to judge" someone born in completely different circumstances than I? We can judge that an act performed or a belief held by a particular, individual ancestor was in itself wrong, but I don't think we justly make a judgement against that particular ancestor.* Naturally what we think can't hurt him or her now, but sneering at our own ancestors hurts us. Cutting ourselves off at the roots makes us a very sick tree.

A very sick tree, and easy to topple.