Why I care about genealogy
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently reconstructing my family tree. In part, it’s simply a hobby, something to pass the spare time in the long, slow Boston winter. The hunt for information, one fact leading to another, is pleasing to a scientist, logical, progressive. Moreover, the Internet has made it easy, as each Google search brings up bizarre new sources of information- who knew there were so many people into transcribing tombstones!
But the hobby’s about something more, about having a sense of history. My wife jokes with me that I’m just interested in proving I was related to a king, but it’s not that at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. There’s a certain humility in knowing that my Italian ancestor, Gaetano Lombardi, got off the docks in New York with $12 in his pocket. There’s a pleasant geographical confusion in realizing my “German” ancestors, the Roeske's, embarked for the US from a city, Stettin, that is now actually in Poland. There’s a certain pride in knowing a relative of mine, Albert Brown, was an engineer in the Panama Canal Zone. And a certain sadness at seeing the rows upon rows of Weimorts' graves in Ponce de Leon, all probably related to me in some fashion lost to the mists of time.
In a sense, my hobby is also a rebellion what Gore Vidal called The United States of Amnesia, our persistent desire to create our own narrative. It is a very democratic belief, this idea that history or paternity does not matter. On my recent trip to San Francisco you felt it most strongly wandering around Palo Alto, this idea that the future is so completely underdetermined that the predictive power of history is very small. While I love this belief, and actually think there’s a lot of truth to it, I somehow enjoy genealogy as the opposite- everyone came from somewhere, has two parents, a fixed birth date and death date. Considered in its entirety, my family tree is a bewildering set of different stories, some of success, some of failure. It is the exact opposite of some pat tale of a descent from a privileged ancestor. As Joseph Brodsky said, “What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.”
But the hobby’s about something more, about having a sense of history. My wife jokes with me that I’m just interested in proving I was related to a king, but it’s not that at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. There’s a certain humility in knowing that my Italian ancestor, Gaetano Lombardi, got off the docks in New York with $12 in his pocket. There’s a pleasant geographical confusion in realizing my “German” ancestors, the Roeske's, embarked for the US from a city, Stettin, that is now actually in Poland. There’s a certain pride in knowing a relative of mine, Albert Brown, was an engineer in the Panama Canal Zone. And a certain sadness at seeing the rows upon rows of Weimorts' graves in Ponce de Leon, all probably related to me in some fashion lost to the mists of time.
In a sense, my hobby is also a rebellion what Gore Vidal called The United States of Amnesia, our persistent desire to create our own narrative. It is a very democratic belief, this idea that history or paternity does not matter. On my recent trip to San Francisco you felt it most strongly wandering around Palo Alto, this idea that the future is so completely underdetermined that the predictive power of history is very small. While I love this belief, and actually think there’s a lot of truth to it, I somehow enjoy genealogy as the opposite- everyone came from somewhere, has two parents, a fixed birth date and death date. Considered in its entirety, my family tree is a bewildering set of different stories, some of success, some of failure. It is the exact opposite of some pat tale of a descent from a privileged ancestor. As Joseph Brodsky said, “What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.”
