Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Knowing Who We Are

Last week I had a special experience at the local family history center where I work as a volunteer. A woman my age came in for some help. She had been adopted as a young child, though she was old enough to have some memories of the event. For various reasons, she had not tried to find out about her birth parents until recently, and then had had quite a difficult task unraveling a trail that had been deliberately set up to prevent doing exactly what she was trying to do. She wanted to find out more about her ancestors especially for her son.

She came in with a birth certificate in hand and asked for assistance in finding out more about the parents whose names appeared on it. The certificate indicated some ethnicities that experienced quite a lot of discrimination at the time this woman had been born, but in her adoptive home she was able to avoid that. Our efforts weren't going anywhere for several hours, then I tried searching another site and found the parents' marriage certificate. They were married at the end of World War II four years before she was born. Everyone in the room was silent as the woman let the information and the new knowledge sink in, and there were tears in a few eyes. Finally her comment was, "I'm not illegitimate." Now illegitimacy carries little of the stigma today that it once did, and one of the other volunteers made a comment to that effect. Her reply was, "It matters to me."

The marriage certificate had the names of the parents of both the bride and groom, including the maiden names of the mothers. With that information we were able to also find the marriage certificates of both sets of her grandparents. Those certificates included the names, including maiden names, of her great grandparents. We were able to find these new names on census records and other sources.

In a few hours, a lady went from knowing no more than the names of her parents to knowing the names of her ancestors for four generations and knowing the places where they had lived. To say she was stunned is an understatement, and she indicated she was going to have to spend some time absorbing all this new information about herself.

In the course of our conversations that afternoon, she mentioned how her son had reacted when her birth certificate had arrived in the mail. He said he had thought that it didn't matter so much if he had information about his heritage. Yet when he saw the certificate and read those names, it was as if a sense of peace came over him.

I have thought about this experience a lot in the past week. I have been fortunate to know who my ancestors are from the time I was small and could see the portraits of great grandparents on the walls of my grandmothers' parlors. I heard their names and their stories. As I get older, I realize these stories have played a part in helping me create a sense of who I am. When I have faced difficulties, I have been able to tell myself to move on, to not feel sorry for myself, to persevere as a certain ancestor had done in a similar situation.

But what if I hadn't known those people and their stories? How would I be different? At a family history conference last summer, one of the keynote speakers said that people disappear in four generations because after that there is no one alive who remembers them. Unless our stories are told and passed down, we lose them. And we lose the people who lived those stories - just as the woman who came to the center last week had lost her families' stories.

Is it any surprise then that genealogy is such a widespread interest in today's world? We need to know the stories and the people that make us who we are. We also need to pass on our stories for the next generations. Good luck putting together your genealogy puzzles.