Mega Link to All 40 of My Genealogy Essays
With a few highlight quotes from each of them
Don’t worry about the 58-minute read time! This post is intended to be a sort of reference. Think of it like an expanded table of contents with a few quotes from each essay. Skim to your heart’s content.
One of the principles of Montessori education is that if you engage with a topic that interests you and you go deep into that topic, you will also go broad as well. The idea is part of what Dr. Maria Montessori called Cosmic Education. She saw that everything is connected to everything. So we can trust the child to decide what to learn based on interest.
Over the past few years, I have been on a massive exploration of my own cosmic autobiography, using genealogy as an entry point to a breadth of viewpoints and knowledge.
For this mega link, I picked out a few favorite quotes from each essay and provided you with a friend link if you get inspired to read more.
There is a book here. Do you know who I should talk to about next steps? Leave me a comment.
I have arranged the essays in order of decreasing number of claps. I realize claps are arbitrary, but it was better than chronological order.
Because I am a nerd for spreadsheets, I used one to figure out the total number of minutes it would take a person to read all the essays (325 minutes = 5.5 hours = Roughly 86,000 words), the total number of reads (8,700 reads, for a total reading time of 46,900 hours), and the total number of claps (14,600 claps).
Thank you!
October 2023
10 Minutes/297 Reads/1.8K Claps
Remembering my grandpap at Halloween.
Halloween is a good time to designate a place in your house to honor and show gratitude to our ancestors.
…We can use genealogy research to find photos and documents that might form part of the altar.
…In our love and gratitude to those ancestors, we also revive and rescue the parts of ourselves that have connections to those people. Ancestor love is self-love, and ancestor appreciation is self-appreciation.
…In learning about my Myers side, I have come to a better appreciation for working-class and rural people in my present-day life. That is helpful because now I live rural and much of the work I do farming is traditionally seen as working-class work.
…Capitalism thrives on those divisions because when middle-class people think they/we are better than working-class folks, we can’t see our common causes.
Recognizing and thanking my grandpap, complete with his flaws, is part of a path to healing myself. And healing myself is part of the bigger project of healing this nation.
…Having a day, place, and/or ritual to show gratitude and honor to ancestors appears to be universal among Indigenous cultures of the world. Autumn is a good time of year to have those rituals because it is a time of transformation. It also makes sense to ensure that ancestors are on your good side going into winter, which has traditionally been a hard time.
…In the Protestant Christian world, by labeling ancestor ceremonies as idolatry, we practice the collective art of forgetting. We keep moving forward, without connection to the spirits of people from the past, and also without connection to relationships with non-humans like plants and animals and their spirits.
…It seems like it is in the best interest of the oppressor to forget. It seems like an oppressor would not want to know about our interconnectedness, because it might cause them/us to question our present-day inequality.
However, forgetting is an unsustainable way to live one’s life. We forget and ignore at our own peril. Ignoring the impacts of our actions has us in a global climate crisis, among other impacts.
The past is only the past in terms of linear time, but actually, it is all happening all at once, everywhere.
Likewise, our increased awareness of the truth about events in the past might change how we think about the present. Thus, in the present, we can change what we think about the past, and it can influence how we think about ourselves in the present.
November 2022
7 Minutes/681 Reads/1.7K Claps
My experience preparing a family tree for my friend who is Black exposed how the historic systemic racism of the United States is reflected in the amount and type of genealogical documents available.
This time, my confidence was misplaced. I had no idea I would run into so many brick walls with this tree. You see, this was my first tree for a Black family.
…The first census that formerly enslaved people appeared in was the 1870 Census. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people were tick marks under the white owner’s “Slave Schedule” census, without names or exact ages. So my assumption was that the best we could do would be to take each line back to a location in 1870. I found it next to impossible to do even that.
…To be white means that I can easily see (at least some of) my stories reflected in the collective national mythos.
As I dug into my friend’s family tree, the mirror I held up to her family showed some difficult truths. To a Black person with ancestors who were enslaved or to a Native American person, the line that “we are a nation of immigrants” rings hollow.
…Researching both families I can see how the documents seem to accumulate more when you are white.
…In the town in Mississippi where my friend’s family is from, the only times her ancestors’ names appeared in the newspaper was when their names were posted as being purged from the voter rolls because of an unpaid poll tax, which was a common Jim Crow era way to disenfranchise Black people.
…We are trying to build a puzzle with dozens of missing pieces. At some point, it is just impossible.
…Ancestry.com is a for-profit company and uncomfortable truths might put off their white customers. Although they have the largest database of subscribers’ trees and an astonishing array of instantly searchable documents, they have repeatedly failed Black Americans.
…in the absence of documents, DNA can corroborate family stories and knowledge and it can tell a kind of story itself.
…It is worth building accurate family trees for Black Americans. Part of this is because the majority of history classes in the United States erase Black people from our nation’s story or minimize their roles in history. A family tree can be a significant act of resistance against the whitewashing of history.
November 2023
10 Minutes/347 Reads/1.2K Claps
There is treasure to be found in genealogy research, but it is not gold or silver.
I like to think we are all heroes in our own stories. What kind of hero do you imagine yourself to be?
Are you a Frodo? Or an Indy?
I’d like to be Frodo, although sometimes my solo functioning pattern makes me into an Indy.
It makes a difference.
…The treasure you seek is to find out who your people are and where they came from, and through this discovery process to hold up a mirror to yourself to see parts of yourself that you have never seen before. When you can see yourself for who you really are, you open the door to the possibility of seeing that you can have something in common with any other person.
Genealogy can be a pathway to building solidarity and connection, both with your ancestors and with people whose stories overlap with yours.
…Like any good quest, the treasure is not easily found. There are challenges, wrong turns, temptations, and obstacles.
One challenge you will face is your own simplified view of the family history.
…Any good quest involves an episode of temptation and genealogy is no exception. For you, the biggest temptation will be to take other people’s trees and use them to instantly build your own tree. It will be like taking a shortcut through the mines of Moria.
…I use the language of quest with brave companions because I think making everything into “a hero’s journey” is one of the problems with our society today.
Almost every story we have seems to revolve around some doofus discovering that they are “the one” who is uniquely suited to save the world. We all grow up with this idea that we could be special. We could be better than everyone else. I think this is a trap.
…The big work of making the world a better place is done in community and that work leads to solidarity. My goal with my genealogy quest is to find out what I have in common with other people, past and present, and use that knowledge to break down barriers that keep me disconnected from other people in my daily life.
…The speaker said that for most of human evolutionary history, an individual who was separated from the group would die. So for millions of years, all the surviving humans were the ones whose behaviors allowed them to stay with the group. And groups that contained individuals who found success at the expense of the group as a whole were selected against. We are hard-wired to cooperate.
…So what happened?
When did we stop being Frodos and turn into Indys?
When did we become a society that values individual selfish achievement over group success?
It didn’t start with capitalism, but that is where we find ourselves now. It started with the rise of cities.
…The individualistic hero who takes and takes has gotten us into a mess of trouble. No thanks, Indy. It is time to throw the ring of power back into the fires in the mountain where it was forged.
Capitalism functions by dividing people into individuals. As emotional individuals (or even nuclear families), we are literally missing our tribe. Our brains and hearts are wired to have a wide social network of mutual support.
…As a genealogist, I can recognize that all of my family lines reach back to eventually to people who were tied to a place and a small community. The diaspora that was the mass immigration of European peoples to North America was part of the growth of cities and market-based cultures in Europe. It was the end of the shire.
Now we find ourselves in a pickle as a society. Capitalism and individualistic competition is killing the planet and exploiting billions of people.
December 2023
12 Minutes/57 reads/1.1K Claps
In which I take a deep dive into the ideas of Daniel Schmachtenberger about our current collective metacrisis.
When it feels like catastrophe is imminent, it might be helpful to know that many of your ancestors survived the end of their worlds.
…he [Daniel Schmachtenberger] calls the multiple converging catastrophes “the metacrisis.” Schmachtenberger describes how we got here and why he maintains hope for humans and life on the planet, despite the ongoing metacrisis.
Like Daniel Schmachtenberger, I have unlikely hope that keeps me going.
I find hope in the simple fact of my own existence. Many of my own ancestors passed through the end of their worlds, and they lived to become part of my lineage. Their adaptability and resilience let me know that we have a chance to make it through the metacrisis.
…Part of my genealogy journey is to find out enough about my ancestors and the times and places they lived in to put myself in their shoes for a minute.
…In each iteration in Wisconsin and in my lineage, people thought their worlds and stories would last and they didn’t.
In each case, it was tragic. The end of the world is a terrible thing. Poverty, forced displacement, genocide, enslavement, the deaths of family members, and more are woven into the stories of my ancestors and the people of Wisconsin. Nobody sailed easy through the end of their world.
And yet, in each case, those who survived did so through ingenuity, adaptation, and grit. There was a new story that emerged. Or an old story was modified to accommodate the new experience.
…Humans have evolved to be adaptable within a “wisdom-rich” environment.
…The theory is that, unlike most animals, which have evolved to meet a specific environment, humans evolved to adapt to any environment. That is why we take so long to reach adulthood: because we are ingenuous adaptive learners.
…It is only recently (in evolutionary terms) that intelligence has lost its tether to wisdom. Schmachtenberger contends that when humans made cities that were large enough that one person or group could succeed at the expense of another person or group without dooming the whole, then the tether was frayed.
But we have not lost wisdom entirely, nor have we lost our adaptability.
…A “third attractor” is something that we don’t have yet but we desperately need. It is a way forward that is neither catastrophe nor dystopia. The potential for a third attractor is what gives Schmachtenberger hope.
…Wisdom is present in the stories of our elders and ancestors. It is present in the Indigenous languages, stories, and cultures of the world. It is present in contemplative spaces. It is present in our works of fiction and poetry.
We must imagine and build the third attractor, together.
June 2022
10 Minutes/1.4K Reads/1.1K Claps
My ancestors lived through one of the worst human-caused disasters in history. I want us to learn the right lessons from their stories.
Tubers didn’t cause it, it was a genocide.
How did so many of our Irish ancestors decide to come here? Ding. Ding. Ding. You guessed it on the first try: the Irish Potato Famine, which is known in Ireland as the “Great Hunger.”
…The Great Hunger is universally recognized as a tragedy of epic proportions. The problem comes when we try to assign blame. “Oh. Those poor Irish people! They depended too much on the potato, and when the blight came, they died or left. What a shame that the potato blight did that!”
…This famine was caused by humans, specifically, the English upper class. Some call it a genocide, and for good reasons.
…Some scholars say that Ireland was the first colony of the British Empire and that they tried out and perfected many of their colonial practices on the Irish. This included the ownership of most of the agricultural land by English absentee landlords.
…There was a concern by the governing Whigs that giving away food would hurt prices in English markets. This was the time of lassiez-faire capitalism and it was decided that the markets could deliver food to the people of Ireland in the most efficient way possible. This did not happen.
In a cruel irony, hands-off capitalism meant that during the height of the famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food, sending grain, beef, and dairy to England, where it commanded a higher price. In fact, when the absentee English landlords learned that their land could produce more of a profit by grazing cattle than housing Irish tenants, they increased the rates of evictions, forcing people from their homes.
…Capitalism funnels wealth to the owning class. In this case, estimates of the rents remitted from Ireland to England at the time were over 8 million pounds per year. English policies in Ireland were designed to keep a permanent underclass of people in poverty. Instead of blaming capitalism for the poverty of the Irish, the English blamed it on flaws in their character. This is another example of race being used as a pretext to blame poor people for inequality caused by capitalism.
…When I reflect on the courage, hard work, and persistence of my Irish ancestors, I am filled with gratitude and appreciation.
…It is likely that although there will be enough food to feed everyone in the coming year, free-market forces will cause food prices to rise in response to this destabilization. The price hikes will force people around the world to make the choices that Irish tenants had to make in Black ’47: pay the rent or feed their children, leave or face starvation. This is already happening.
…Is our collective inability to recognize that unrestrained free-market capitalism caused the Great Hunger a “bug” in the system? Or is it a “feature?”
…In the “bug” narrative, where we ascribe the cause of the famine to the potato blight, we let capitalism off the hook. We say free-market capitalism is the best way to meet the needs of the people, except for this one time when a potato blight f**ked it up for a few million Irish tenant farmers. That dang blight!
Or worse, the “bug” is the Irish. Instead of blaming the blight, people blamed the Irish. The Irish were blamed at the time. They were called lazy, backward, savage, and all manner of insults.
…But if we think of the famine as a “feature” of capitalism and not a “bug,” then it starts to make more sense, to me.
…The Irish famine was a “feature” of capitalism because if there had been a robust response and no one had suffered, then who would have worked in all those dangerous mines and mills for pennies?
Capitalism has always had “sacrifice zones” at the edges.
March 2023
9 Minutes/473 Reads/1K Claps
1. Start strong
2. The US Census is your friend
3. Always add information for siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles
4. Use Extreme Caution With Other People’s Trees
5. DNA DNA DNA
6. Newspapers, City Directories, and Find-A-Grave
7. Ask your family
8. Constellate to disambiguate
9. Brick walls can be knocked down with DNA tricks
10. Sleep on it
February 2022
7 Minutes/544 Reads/782 Claps
This essay includes more introspection about why genealogy is so interesting to me.
Her song “Truth Hurts” references a meme that references a tweet, which references how popular genetic ancestry tests are in the USA. I feel it. All of it.
…I can’t speak for all Americans, but I can start with myself. It might come down to me wanting to belong.
…Belonging was so important for me because I felt like I was outside of the norm. I was a new kid. I was a sensitive kid. My dad did not hunt with the other dads. I was shy. I wanted people to like me and accept me.
…Starting at least with the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots, and probably before that, Americans have been itching to find out who and what we are.
…If I had to guess why other people in the United States might be interested in genealogy, I might say that we, collectively, are the “new kid.”
…Some say that the American focus on patriotism is partly because the nation had to be invented out of thin air. Many point to the architecture in Washington DC, with its deliberate callbacks to Roman and Greek ruins, as an attempt to show that our nation belongs. We act like we have something to prove — a chip on our shoulder. We make myths about our Founding Fathers and hold onto them to help us feel like we are good people.
…We imagine hard-working immigrants pioneering in the West and men coming home from the Revolution or Civil War to begin making America into an industrial powerhouse.
…I think genealogy itself can be inclusive. It can help us see what we have in common with other people. An inclusive genealogy can be an effort to fight against the myth-making of exceptionalism.
We actually don’t want the myth.
…It is well worth unraveling the cloth and reweaving it, and to me, this is the greatness of our nation. We constantly reinvent ourselves.
January 2023
10 Minutes/215 Reads/544 Claps
Using DNA extracted from ancient skeletons, researchers can tell a more accurate story about human origins in Europe. The new story undermines some racist ways pre-history has been represented.
For people of European ancestry, we can find some of our deep backstories in a recent book by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe (translated by Caroline Wright) called A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe.
Johannes Krause is an archaeogeneticist and Thomas Trappe is a journalist who was brought in to make archaeogenetics understandable to people like me.
…Just a few years ago, archaeogenetic technology didn’t exist. It depends on the ability of machines to rapidly sequence the entire genome of a human from a scrap of bone or tooth from an ancient skeleton. Then, that genome needs to be compared to other ancient DNA samples using high-powered computers and the data has to be analyzed to look for meaningful differences between the samples.
…Since mutations happen at a predictable pace, by comparing the number and type of junk DNA mutations between various samples, scientists can tell where and when each sample diverged from every other sample in their database. They can build a family tree and a timeline for human history and migration.
…These early hunter-gatherers had what we might call a good life. They worked an average of two to four hours per day (estimates based on observations of present-day hunter-gatherer societies). They were relatively free of communicable diseases due to their widely dispersed populations. They ate a varied diet, which included a lot of protein from wild animals, and as such, their diet was rich in Vitamin D from natural sources, and their skin was as black as their African ancestors (according to DNA analysis of ancient skeletons).
…A new population migrated into Europe from a region called Anatolia, which is in modern-day Turkey. These Anatolians had developed or acquired a new set of skills called farming, which allowed them to live in closer quarters and have a greater population than the hunter-gatherers who were already living in Europe.
…The farmers were physically smaller, less healthy, and specifically, their grain and dairy-based diet lacked Vitamin D. This dietary deficiency led to selection pressure for lighter skin among the farmers, in order to facilitate an alternate path to Vitamin D through a sunlight conversion process.
…According to [Nell Irvin] Painter and others, Europeans thought of themselves as from a specific place like Barcelona or Denmark, but didn’t have a sense of identity or superiority based on skin color. The racial category of “white” was invented to justify the invention of the racial category of “black.”
Along with the invention of whiteness, a unique origin story for white people was also invented. They/we were a separate subspecies, originating in Europe.
…the problem is that the earliest Europeans who were hunting and gathering were Black like their African relatives, and those people were only able to expand into Europe because of evolutionary processes that happened earlier, in Africa. Later, when people did enter Europe with lighter skin, it was only because of a farming technology that was developed in the Middle East. If this book tells the deep origin story of white people, then the principal takeaway is that we are neither unique nor superior.
August 2023
9 Minutes/50 Reads/531 Claps
In this essay, I bring the topic of non-monogamous sex to my rural Wisconsin newspaper column readers.
…today we are going to talk about sex outside of marriage.
…It is time to look at infidelity and out-of-wedlock births.
This is a group that resists standard genealogical research. Whenever there is a child born outside of marriage, they don’t necessarily fit into the typical version of a family tree.
…Infidelity is an old story that we thought we knew, but new research is turning that story upside down.
The old story said that males have an evolutionary drive to be promiscuous and females have an opposite drive to be choosy and monogamous.
…There is a new story about sex, which is actually a much older story. Almost everything about the standard story of infidelity has now come into question, based on new research into this older story.
…The new story suggests that during the three million-plus years of evolutionary environment for early humans both males and females had distinct evolutionary advantages that favored promiscuity. It was only the advent of settled agriculture about 10,000 years ago that tipped the balance to occasionally favor monogamy.
…Within the semi-nomadic early human bands, sex was one of the ways that both males and females (and non-binary folks, too, I assume) maintained and cemented these relationships of reciprocity.
…The theory is that it was advantageous for human females to have multiple partners and paternal uncertainty because then the multiple partners would all have potential connections to their offspring and those multiple partners would share food with the mother and children. It was a sharing network, not a strict biological nuclear family.
…All of this suggests that sex served much more than a simple procreative function for early humans. It was more like social glue. In a true sharing economy, monogamy may have even been disadvantageous, because it would limit the pool of resource sharing to just one other adult.
February 2024
5 Minutes/34 Reads/481 Claps
I like to think genealogy research is a way to create a family heirloom that can be passed on to future generations.
In our house, I could walk around and easily see many items that belonged to someone in my or my partner’s family. Our house feels like an ongoing reminder of who we are connected to and where we came from. I feel lucky to have every item.
…There is so much from the lives of my ancestors that did not make it. That is okay. I don’t think I want ALL of the old newspapers and musty clothes. There are extremes.
…I probably have at least a dozen reasons to try to learn and save information and documents about my ancestors. But it might come down to a psychological need to save and collect stuff.
…My family tree is accessible to my extended family online, including some people I have never met in person.
…I want to save everything, but I can’t. I think much of my family tree work is like my sister-in-law’s scrapbooking. I am trying to sort out documents, photos, and stories so that they are all in one place and accessible to me and to my extended family.
December 2022
6 Minutes/22 Reads/468 Claps
I would love to hear your stories of genealogy tourism. Here is one of mine.
If I had the money and time I might spend a lot of it tracing the footsteps of my ancestors.
…I think I could easily get lost visiting places and imagining what their lives might have been like. I already do. I look at documents and I am transported back.
…Our guide was very knowledgeable and I told him that I had family ties to New Orleans, which piqued his curiosity.
…My great-great-grandmother and most of my other relatives died in Texas, but her brother Phillip Dielmann died in New Orleans in 1897. He looked in his directory and found my great-great-great uncle’s grave a few feet from where we were standing, on the “main drag” of one the most popular tourist cemeteries in New Orleans. What a coincidence!
…My family history has come alive for me through documents and stories, but because of a few coincidences, I have visited places where my ancestors stood. I would love to eventually plan some trips around family history research.
Is My Genealogy Hobby Racist?
What I learned as a potential Son of the American Revolution.
medium.com
December 2021
10 Minutes/1.1K Reads/440 Claps
This essay started out about the Sons of the American Revolution and it turned into a critique of my own motivations for pursuing my genealogy project.
The answer is… probably yes.
…We live in a society where systemic racism is part many of institutions: education, justice, politics, and more, and genealogy is no exception.
I want to become aware of how racism is part of my ancestry research and how I can try to turn my genealogy hobby into a liberation project.
…My research led me to a number of documents related to the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, also known as the SAR and the DAR.
…The SAR and the DAR were started in the late 1800s during a time when the United States was experiencing an influx of immigrants who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant…Within this context, there was a push to maintain the dominance of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage people.
…The DAR and SAR were explicitly elitist organizations, and focused as they were on ethnic purity, these groups also deliberately excluded Black people and Native Americans.
…Along with the white people who have used genealogy to connect with their/our colonial ancestry in an elitist and racist way, other white people have used genealogy to disavow their/our connection to slavery and white supremacy.
…This story of working-class white ancestors pulling themselves up by their bootstraps runs just as much risk of being revisionist history as the DAR/UDC Anglo-Saxon ancestor superiority versions.
…How much of my initial impulse to find out about my ancestors’ military service was motivated by a desire to be recognized as a legitimate American?
…Genealogy has long been used as a means to make power and privilege seem legitimate (patriarchy, anyone?), and the lineage societies’ magical “founding fathers” and the bootstrap immigrant myths are good examples of this. But those uses of genealogy only reach for part of the truth.
We can use the same set of ancestry resources and practices to use genealogy to undermine racism and elitism, and those are my goals.
Part of white privilege is document privilege. When white people like me build up mountains of documents about our ancestors, it may start to feel like people who are outside of the system are somehow less legitimate. In present-day United States, “undocumented” people have few rights and privileges, and that prejudice extends to our ancestors.
September 2023
8 Minutes/49 Reads/400 Claps
This year I came across two podcasts that went after The Little House on the Prairie. It shocked me. How could anyone question the Laura Ingalls Wilder? I was so naive.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter. As an amateur genealogist, my goal is to hold up a mirror to myself and to my clients so that our stories are true stories.
Capitalism is propped up by simplistic stories that deliberately hide the truth…
…In a larger sense, everyone who lives in the Midwest lives close to the Ingalls family because their version of what it means to be a pioneer pervades the collective identity of almost all who have family ties back to the 1800s (excluding, of course, Indigenous folks).
…This is why I felt cheated when I learned that the pioneer story I learned through the Little House TV show was deliberately altered to push a libertarian political agenda.
…My recent binge listen has come in the form of Brian Halpin’s Before We Were White podcast. Halpin uses genealogy and historical documents to critically examine the stories we tell ourselves about whiteness.
…The show, under MacBride’s co-production, became a propaganda piece for Libertarian values. It also literally “whitewashed” the historical people of the story by erasing key people of color from the narrative and casting blue-eyed blond Nordic people in key roles, while minimizing Indigenous people to paternalistic tropes.
…I think our goal when investigating stories is not to flip the script and vilify all the things we once held dear. Instead, we get to say “thank you” to the stories that helped us get where we are today, while also acknowledging that we will benefit from gaining the complexity and nuance from learning the rest of the story and the different perspectives within the original story.
…In my genealogy quest, I say “Don’t give me the brush off.” I want to know that George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth, but rather his teeth were taken from enslaved people. And I want to know that Pa Ingalls struggled to feed his family and relied on the government. I want to know if my own people owned people or if they were so poor they needed help from the government.
Half-truths dull our ability to empathize and don’t prepare us well for a complex present.
May 2023
7 Minutes/1.96K Reads/374 Claps
This is a companion piece to my earlier essay about why my German ancestors emigrated in the 1840s. The reasons in the 1880s were similar but different.
Between 1800 and 1919, more than 7 million Germans immigrated to the United States. Today, descendants of those immigrants make up 17% of the US population, numbering more than 49 million people.
…Farmland was hard to come by in Germany, and much of the available land was of increasingly marginal productivity. By contrast, the Homestead Act of 1863 guaranteed free farmland on the fertile soils of the Midwest to anyone of European origin who claimed the land by farming it. It was like a dream come true (for settlers, not the Indigenous people).
… a global depression in 1873 hit Germany especially hard. For the following six years, Germany saw annual declines in the net national product, and recovery didn’t really come until the mid-1890s.
…The United States is facing wave of immigrants from Central America. Reminiscent of the Germans in the 1880s, they are fleeing the effect of decades of stagnant growth and double-digit unemployment and seeking opportunities unavailable in their home countries.
…I don’t blame my ancestors, but they likely would never have come if Native people had retained their ancestral lands in the Midwest. The wave of German immigration in the 1880s is especially linked to the taking of Native lands.
September 2022
8 Minutes/30 reads/350 Claps
Again and again, my genealogy research exposes me to viewpoints that undermine my sense of who I am. My goal is to keep an open mind and expand my sense of self as I learn new ways of thinking and seeing the world. Dr. Kim Tallbear questions the very idea of genealogy.
When I first heard Dr. Kim Tallbear in the For the Wild podcast, I thought her perspective might make a nice counterpoint to my obsession over genealogy. She speaks of the “family you make” and the importance of kin bonds with human and non-human living beings.
…She strongly criticizes white people like me from the United States who think that having a genealogical relationship to an identity makes us into that identity. Instead, she questions the idea of ownership and property, and she invites us to a liberatory view of identity based on relationships of reciprocity. The implications of her worldview challenge monogamy, patriarchy, and private property.
…I want to use genealogy to hold up an accurate mirror to myself and the world, and not use it to justify privilege or to construct an identity that is not based on real relationships.
…We, in the United States, have a dangerous theory of multiculturalism that allows us to pick and choose how we want to identify, and DNA tests and ancestry research can reinforce an “identity-on-demand.” Dr. Kim Tallbear references this phenomenon in her essay “We Are Not Your Dead Ancestors,” where she calls out white people who claim Indigenous identity…
…Instead of a mirror, we are seeing ourselves through a photoshopped Instagram filter.
…Document-based genealogy has a history of being used to affirm patriarchal lineage for property disbursement. Dr. Tallbear links monogamous, sanctioned marriage to the colonization of the North American continent. She calls it a tool of genocide and a necessary part of the settler colonial project.
…The concept of the nuclear family being linked to ownership of property meant that the wife and children in the family were essentially considered the property of and dependent upon the man. Dr. Tallbear asserts that this was directly at odds with the Indigenous people whose land was being taken.
…What is in conflict during the ongoing process of settler colonization is the clash between a relational model of family/interaction with nature and a patriarchal ownership model of family and interaction with nature. To claim an identity based on DNA or documents, without a real relationship is like colonists coming to North America and planting a flag and claiming land.
…To fight our way back to sustainability, we must enter into real kin relationships with human and non-human living beings in our communities.
May 2022
8 Minutes/279 Reads/280 Claps
Researching for this essay opened my eyes to epigenetics, a field of study that people would have said was magic just a few decades ago. Humans can pass on their experiences to their offspring.
I learned from my dad about how my grandma had lived through the Great Depression, and how she saved things that might be useful. I loved my grandma dearly, and I understood implicitly what my dad was getting at because I also saved things.
…Could I have inherited my hoarding tendencies from my grandma, even though she acquired her behavior during her lifetime? The science of epigenetics suggests just this.
…Many therapists use a tool called a “genogram” to tease out the deep history of their clients. The genogram maps events and relationships onto a family tree, as a starting point for understanding and healing.
…the science of epigenetics is proposing that such behaviors might also be coded into the way our cells express the information found in the DNA.
…Epigenetics is based on the idea that although each cell contains a complete set of our DNA, the expression of that DNA depends on a number of factors.
…studies have shown that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can affect the epigenetics of people.
…In one famous study, researchers Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler of Emory Univerity studying rats combined an electric shock with the smell of cherry blossoms. The rats came to exhibit a startle response every time the scent of cherry blossoms was introduced to their cages, even when the shock was not applied. What amazed researchers was that the offspring and grand offspring of those rats exhibited the same behavior, even when raised by other rat parents which had not experienced the electric shocks.
…What amazed the scientists was that they could identify the methylation patterns for several generations after the exposure, despite no continued toxin exposure to the offspring. What happened to our grandparents has echos in our epigenomes.
…Some scientists speculate that the “stickiness” of epigenetic tags could be a way for a family or population to pass on adaptive behaviors or biological adaptation to the environment.
…In his recent book My Grandmother’s Hands, author and therapist Resmaa Menakem writes about the need to heal from what he calls ”transgenerational trauma,” and he gives readers body-centered practices to release the trauma.
…It looks like our genetic expression is fluid and can be influenced. This doesn’t just apply to people who have experienced PTSD or other trauma. We could all benefit from nurturing touch and supportive listening.
…Each of these collective experiences has the potential to be healed and transformed, and now that we know that trauma can be retained and passed on through many generations, we bear a responsibility to stop it from being transferred to the next generation.
January 2022
7 Minutes/310 Reads/237 Claps
Can genealogy work be a path toward healing ancestral trauma? Yaa Gyasi’s novel is an example of survival and healing.
What if by writing the stories of your ancestors you can begin to heal deep wounds inside of you?
What if by reading the ancestral stories of others you can come to an understanding of something universal within your own story?
…This novel specifically references ancestral healing and the importance of knowing family stories, even as the traumatic events of the stories conspired to separate ancestors from their own families and stories and prevent healing. We can all follow Gyasi’s example and learn our own family stories and construct healing stories for people in our tree.
…Our genealogy work can reveal potential trauma that affected our ancestors, and this discovery work of genealogy can also be part of the process of healing.
…Ancestral trauma can function in a person’s life without the person knowing where it started. It can just feel like daily life.
…Yaa Gyasi reaches for the effects of trauma both on those receiving the trauma and on those perpetrating the traumatic events. Gyasi sees how being a perpetrator is part of a cycle of trauma, and to heal from these events, it is just as necessary to support the perpetrators as the abused.
…When I think of my own ancestors, my journey of discovery began with me knowing next to nothing about their lives. As I slowly built my family tree and found more documents, I could imagine their lives in more and more detail. I could not skip over the trauma implied in the documents: an early death of a mother, a sibling lost to war, families separated during immigration, rape of an enslaved young woman, childhood death to disease and drowning. Every generation reveals stories.
…My ancestors did not experience that specific trauma nor that specific healing, but to be human is to pass through trauma.
…One of the actions of trauma is to create a fog of forgetfulness. This happens on the individual level and on the societal level.
…This is why family tree work can be healing for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or class. Within the tree, we construct stories, and we know that, by definition, ancestral stories are survival stories.
October 2022
7 Minutes/45 reads/235 Claps
I describe a method that is useful for solving “brick wall” problems in building a family tree. As long as you have a DNA sample, you have a good chance of making a connection with a relative.
I have found birth parents for people by using the same techniques forensic genealogists use to find killers or rapists.
…Let’s imagine we have DNA evidence from a crime scene. The first step would be to get DNA samples from the victim, the first responders, and others who may have contaminated the crime scene evidence. Then once those people are ruled out, we submit the unknown crime scene DNA to Ancestry.com and other genealogy websites and wait for the results.
Once we have results, we treat the sample from the crime scene just like a client who is looking for their birth parents.
…Sometimes we can get lucky and find a close relative like a brother or parent who has already submitted a sample. Most of the time we don’t get so lucky.
…So I take the DNA matches from people who have submitted a public tree and I start importing some of their trees to the blank tree I created for the suspect/adoptee. As I import the information from each DNA match, I create a “dangling tree” that is not yet connected to the suspect/adoptee.
…It is like building a family tree without the trunk. Instead, we just have branches suspended in the air.
As I build the clusters, I can start to put people into two categories: the mother’s side and the father’s side. I set up one part of the tree to house all of the speculatory branches for the mother’s side and another for all of the speculatory branches for the father’s side.
…Usually, I can complete the work needed to locate a birth parent (or, I suppose, a killer) in 5 to 10 hours of solid digging.
…There are some pretty major ethical issues with forensic genealogy.
…This is especially dangerous when we see that in some places law enforcement has a history of focusing on selectively applying the laws against poor and minority populations. So any time we increase the efficiency of law enforcement without addressing systemic discrimination, then we might make that discrimination worse.
August 2023
7 Minutes/24 Reads/217 Claps
What if my ancestors went to a Ren Faire?
Why do I love the Ren Faires so much?
Perhaps it is a matter of wanting to dress up and act like my European ancestors in order to have some connection to my forebears.
…It turns out that Medieval and Renaissance-era fairs may have been more like our modern Ren Faires than I first thought.
…During the Middle Ages, the herring migration was so plentiful that the mass of fish could block ships.
During that time, a seasonal fishing village would form near the best Danish herring fishing grounds. The Hanseatic merchants would buy the catch directly from the Danish fisherpeople and use salt from German mines to preserve it in barrels.
…The small village would balloon in population during the herring run…
…People would store up their saleable goods and bring them in for these occasional fairs, and others would travel from fair to fair.
Thus the herring camp might actually have looked much like our modern Ren Faires. It would have had merchants from all over setting up stores in temporary structures. It would have had people selling food out of temporary kitchens. It would have entertainment that might even have included people from the Middle East, up from Novgorod and Constantinople. There would have been fortunetellers and priests and maybe even (but probably not) Morris dancers from England. It would be a place with dozens of languages spoken and people walking around in all sorts of outfits.
April 2023
11 Minutes/68 reads/210 Claps
To build a family tree is to construct the skeleton of a family story. We are our stories and how we tell our own story matters a lot. This novel invites readers into an alternate world of magical stories that undermine our present-day dominant narrative.
Each of us makes meaning of our lives through stories. We, humans, live out our lives by casting ourselves in plays where we are both the main characters and also the authors of the stories.
There is a distinct danger in living within an unhealthy story. Unhealthy stories can hijack our true selves and animate us like zombies.
We as a nation desperately need to wake up from a number of collective stories that have been causing us harm — leaving us with climate change, inequality, racism, and fear. The harmful stories are based in fear and they lead to systems of domination, where people take without giving back.
…In pre-Christian Russia, the people believed that every place had a fae folk creature who lived there and tended to the living beings in that place. The people took the existence of these fae guardians for granted, and they left them scraps of food and offerings of salt.
Vasya’s magic is rooted in the old ways. Vasya’s abilities allowed her to see the creatures and talk with them, whereas other people only assumed they exist.
In the early days of Christian Russia, the belief in and honoring of the fae folk continued to coexist alongside the faith in Christ. But in Arden’s story, a Christian priest comes to live in Pyotr’s village, and he tells the people to stop feeding the fae folk.
…In the novel, there is a danger that magic will disappear if people stop believing in it. The domovoi (like a house elf?) of the house becomes shriveled and weak when people turn away from him. Without accepting gifts, like Arden’s story, we too can become shriveled and weak. We can lose connection with each other and the natural world, and we can become susceptible to being controlled by other stories of fear and blame. Our web of mutual gift-giving sustains us.
…Arden seems to be offering a critique of our modern world in the form of an adult fairy tale set in medieval Russia. She seems to be saying that we are on the brink of chaos and destruction because we are ruled by stories of fear. She offers us a solution in our own courage to believe in the power of relationships of mutuality.
…Katherine Arden’s novel offers us all a spark of something subversive outside the dominant narrative.
Our planet is in danger because of a dominant story that is based on fear and hierarchy and hoarding, but there has always been a counternarrative based on generosity, connection, and relationships of reciprocity. The counternarrative can best be found in cultures with long histories of sustained connection to specific places. Indigenous cultures have had to develop stories that function to sustain people and the land over many generations.
June 2023
11 Minutes/24 reads/201 Claps
Whether I am consciously aware of history or not doesn’t matter. The stories of my ancestors continue to animate me. So I might as well learn what happened to them so I can choose the story I want to live by.
German history in the Middle Ages is like Game of Thrones but without dragons and magic. There is so much intrigue and the empire seems to fall apart and get rebuilt every five years or so.
My key takeaway so far is that the years formerly known as the Dark Ages were by no means unimpactful, and a lot happened during those years that we feel in our lives today.
What does it mean to have ancestors from Germany? Here are eight lessons from the podcast so far.
…Priestly celibacy is not in the Bible but it had a key role in Medieval times, and the impacts are still being felt today.
…Under Pope Gregory VII, things changed. The Papacy became more powerful. The more powerful Pope needed something to maintain the legitimacy and power of the church because the power of the local bishops and priests was no longer directly tied to the local rulers.
Amid the rise of lay piety, the church needed moral authority and thus we got church reform against simony (the selling of church positions) and against licentiousness.
…After Canossa, the nobles also extracted promises from a weakened King Henry IV that kingship would no longer be hereditary, but rather by election of the nobles. So just when England and France were strengthening their monarchies, the Germans were weakening theirs.
…Fortified castles and armored knights grew as technologies to protect against invasion by horse archers — and it worked. Soon the kings of Hungary became vassals to the German Emperor — and soon the castles and the knights themselves became problems.
…The Germans were the victims of their own success. They defeated the horse lords and thus had no need for a tax collection system.
…For this entire period, the people in the empire would not have considered themselves Germans.
…The expansion of Christianity was used as justification for empire and conquest. Basically, pagans were fair game during this time, and this especially applied to the pagan Slavs to the east. This makes the plunder of the New World by European Christians 500 years later make more sense.
…Without a strong central authority, each king or emperor (to be an official emperor one had to be crowned by the pope) had to contend with the high probability of internal rebellion.
…The story of the Medieval Germans continues to animate people. Living a life the “right” way was an important factor for pious Germans of the time. The potential consequence of worshiping with the wrong priest was eternal damnation, so people took such rules seriously. Many of the German heritage people I know respect rules and timeliness and decorum.
Likewise, the Germans were among the first in Europe to reject absolute monarchy. They thought for themselves and made decisions based on self-interest and logic, as well as tradition. My German heritage family and friends are independent thinkers.
February 2023
8 Minutes/64 Reads/199 Claps
This is an essay in which I draw the link between the coming of cheap cotton produced on forced labor camps (plantations) and the destabilization of the cottage industry in linen in Northern Germany which directly preceded my ancestors’ emigration.
I think everything is connected and it is worth pursuing connections in history because they can tell us something about our present-day situation.
What could German emigration have to do with slavery? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
…The production of fabric from flax was a huge economic boon for people in Northern Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. Before the Industrial Revolution, fabric was mostly produced in homes.
…When Eli Whitney patented a mechanical cotton gin in 1794, it exponentially increased the speed of removing cotton seeds from the fibers. The cotton gin changed the economics of growing cotton…From 1800 to 1860, every decade saw growth in cotton exports and in the number of enslaved people.
…Is it a coincidence that my grandma’s ancestors left the Osnabrück region in 1840, just as cotton and the mills killed cottage industry?
There could have been other drivers. I could also blame the potato.
…I could also blame the Haitian Revolution.
The importance of the Haitian Revolution is not taught in American schools, at least it wasn’t taught in my high school. Thomas Jefferson was terrified of the Haitian Revolution because it was a successful slave revolt in the most prosperous colony of the Americas. It was a big deal.
…With New Orleans in the hands of the United States, the entire Mississippi River system was made available for immigration, which allowed millions of Germans to find cheap land in climates that they were used to.
Jefferson, and other Presidents after him, had learned a lesson about too many Black people from Haiti. Jefferson wanted the United States to be an Anglo-Saxon nation. The door was made wide open for white immigrants from Northern Europe, just as cheap cotton from the Deep South killed cottage industry in a demographically challenged Osnabrück region.
July 2022
11 Minutes/7 reads/195 Claps
The “population bomb” scare was very present for me during my growing up years. I never considered that it was used to justify so many racist policies.
The documents we can find through genealogy can give us a picture of what life might have been like for our ancestors. Big families were a defining feature of life for my ancestors.
…It is the realm of demographics to study population-level trends. As a genealogist, I can look at demographic trends on the micro-scale by looking at my tree and the trees of people who I help.
…I did a little statistical analysis of my family tree. In the mid-1800s, my 32 great-great-great-grandparents averaged 9.6 children per family. My 16 great-great-grandparents averaged 6.25 children. My eight great-grandparents averaged 5.25 children per family. My four grandparents averaged 3.5 children per couple. My parents had three children.
Given those birth rates, if every child lived long enough to raise a family, my 32 great-great-great grandparents would have about 50,000 descendants of my generation. Whoa.
…On the whole, it is probably a good thing that the average family size has shrunk over the years.
In the 1960s and 70s, scientists Anne and Paul Erhlich saw the exponential increase in the global population as a threat to civilization, a “population bomb.”
…The population bomb distress call was not just about ecologists raising the alarm about overpopulation, but rather (intended or not) it had the effect of demonizing the poor people and poor nations where people were having more children.
…The fact that so many poor people and poor nations are not white created a culture of blaming Black and Brown people for the feared population bomb of the 1970s. It was a rare point that white liberals and conservatives could agree upon. Black and Brown people were having too many babies! Panic ensued.
…I think the irony was lost on 1970s policymakers that while they were wringing their hands about people in poor neighborhoods and in developing nations having so many children, their own great-grandparents had produced a population bomb of white mega consumers, one which continues to have a disproportionate effect on the planet’s resources.
…Studies have shown that one of the key factors for development and prosperity is when a country values the education of women and girls. Educated women who have access to contraception tend to choose when and how many children to have. Educated women also delay childbirth and enter the workforce.
…On the right, the 1970s population bomb distress echos today when we hear about “replacement theory.” The concern is that we have stopped having enough (white) children and we (white Americans) are in danger of being overrun by immigrants and Black people.
…I’m not saying that the population is not growing. My point is that we need to be wary of population bomb narratives because they play on our fears, both on the left and on the right. When we are in a state of fear, we don’t make the best decisions.
August 2022
6 Minutes/11 Reads/123 Claps
The United States in 1950 was whiter and more segregated. Some want policies designed to go back to that. That would be a mistake.
The recent release of the 1950 census data has me thinking about how racist policies that deliberately excluded non-white people may have shaped my reality growing up in small-town Wisconsin in the 1970s.
…most of my parents’ generation, born in the 1940s, are still alive and I can finally see them as children in the 1950 census.
…A census is like having a single snapshot of a family, taken once every ten years. It is something, but it also misses so much.
…The census, taken as a whole, is also a snapshot of the entire country. In 1950, the United States was very different from how it is now. That snapshot in 1950 would have looked much more white. In the 1950 census, the options for race were white, Black, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and American Indian. According to the 1950 census, the USA was 89.5% white and 10% Black in 1950. The rest of the identified races comprised only .5% of the population. People of Mexican or other Latin American ancestry were identified as white, although a separate census document found 2.3 million people with Spanish surnames, representing 1.5% of the total population, mostly living in the Southwest and California.
…While keeping Asian, Latin American, and Southern and Eastern European people out through racist and xenophobic immigration laws, Black Americans were kept from white neighborhoods in the north through redlining policies and racial covenants.
…The snapshot of America that was the 1950 census showed a population that was deliberately crafted to be homogenous. But that was all about to change.
…According to the most recent data, the total population has gone from 151 million to just over 331 million. By the same data, white people make up 61.6% of the population, with Latin American people at 18.7% and Black people at 12.4%, with the remaining groups at 7.3%. We are more diverse than ever.
…Some benefits of integration that stand out to me are higher test scores, better critical thinking and problem solving, improved self-confidence and leadership skills, reduced anxiety, better preparation for the global economy, higher earnings later as adults, and improved health outcomes.
It seems ironic to discover that integration leads to so many improved outcomes. The irony is that so many of the policies were enacted to keep America homogenously white in an effort to protect a certain standard of living and way of life…
…One of the key observations by researchers is that an integrated childhood better prepares young people for an integrated adulthood.
March 2021
6 Minutes/27 Reads/69 Claps
I am grateful to my friend Wendy, who is Anishinaabe, for giving me notes on this essay. The particular nature of the oppression of Indigenous people is to attempt to erase their history, culture, language, and people in order to take their land.
One of my goals as a genealogist is to distinguish (to quote mixed-race author Darnella Davis) “who we are” from “who we think we are.”
…I am white, and seeing the impact of my white identity is a challenge for me. However, that family story is still there, and to ignore it entirely risks erasing true stories of Indigenous people to whom I am connected. Erasure is also a problem.
…I encourage everyone to get a tape recorder, or a notebook, and interview your oldest relatives. Bring your family tree and old photo albums along and ask about specific people and places. Even small details can prove vital to research and to your connection with your family history.
…DNA is a terrible way to measure if someone is Indigenous, anyway. It reenacts centuries of times when white people tried to decide who was — and was not — Indigenous, usually to justify their own purposes.
…A better way to claim Indigenous identity would be to look to tradition, family, and relationships, none of which I have, possibly due to the assimilation forced on Native Americans throughout our nation’s history.
…In seeking out the history of the Indigenous people I may be connected to, I stumbled upon a disturbing pattern. When engineers needed to find a site to build a dam for electric power generation, or for flood control, they often chose to flood reservation land.
…An antidote to erasure, and stereotypical ideas about Indigenous people, is to learn the specific stories, histories, and present status of the people whose land you occupy. Along with those stories comes a recognition that the descendants of those original displaced people are still here, and are still fighting for rights and recognition. What is deeply in the past for most white people is a present-day reality for many Indigenous communities fighting to retain or re-claim resources vital to their basic survival (and guaranteed under the US Constitution’s treaty provision).
For people who grew up white, like me, by bringing Indigenous people into our minds as present-day people from specific places with specific histories, we can begin to free ourselves from harmful stereotypes and erasure. We can begin to see our common cause. Our stories are shared and interlocking. By ignoring that, we risk repeating the injustices of the past.
April 2021
11 Minutes/170 Reads/60 Claps
Published in Nerd For Tech
Each time I learn about a new aspect of my own ancestry, I examine my own biases and prejudices related to that identity. By disrupting my understanding of Neanderthals I can disrupt other biases that are linked.
My DNA test had me feeling a little like a caveman, and it sparked curiosity about what my Neanderthal ancestors were really like. I wanted to know more about this “deep ancestry” and you might, too. How did that DNA get into my genome? And what made early modern humans so successful in displacing Neanderthals?
…The old idea was that modern humans were just superior to Neanderthals and they out-competed them or killed them off. Recent studies have revealed that it was more complicated than that.
…When someone calls you a Neanderthal, they are putting you into an out-group with their name calling — which is trademark behavior of Homo sapiens, with our large and complex social groups. Whenever there is an out group, there is the risk of generalizing and harmful stereotypes.
…Every indication is that Neanderthals were highly intelligent and well adapted for their environment.
Perhaps we could learn something from Neanderthals? Their way of life did not destroy their habitat, as ours is doing.
November 2021
8 Minutes/23 Reads/53 Claps
I have DNA that is consistent with Ashkenazi Jewish populations. I live in a country where anti-Semitism operates all the time, usually unacknowledged.
But what if instead of fostering connection and community, a greeting like this unintentionally signals the assumed supremacy of one group of people over another?
…I can thank my preacher father for setting up seders and celebrating Passover within the context of his Lutheran church. In my childhood understanding, Jewish people were the good guys, including, of course, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the disciples.
…In the past several years, anti-Semitic acts have been increasing in the United States. This is part of a historical pattern where when times are hard economically or socially, Jewish people get blamed and targeted. We must do better.
…Given what I know about my family history, my Jewish ancestor would likely have been born in Germany in the 1700s or early 1800s. Since I don’t know the specifics, I can do what I can learn about the general history of Ashkenazi Jewish people in Europe.
…Although my immediate ancestors emigrated, other family members stayed in Germany and their descendants were present during the events of Hitler’s rise to power and the Holocaust. It is possible many of these cousins of my grandparents went along with the NAZIs.
…However, the truth is important. Bad things happen when we ignore the truth because it is too painful.
…By continuing to misidentify all Jewish people as the cause of oppression, it allows the actual oppressive structures to stay in place.
…My discoveries make me want to do better as a human. My DNA test brought my attention to a place where I had already been thinking about doing better.
I enjoy the Christmas season, but I have been slowly retooling my own greetings and conversations to not assume everyone I speak to is a Christian.
January 2022
8 Minutes/44 Reads/51 Claps
Patriarchy is everywhere in the documents that genealogists use. We have to make an effort to find the women’s stories. It is worth it because our collective liberation is intertwined.
But even as society is moving away from patriarchy, most genealogy research is still stuck in a male ancestor-dominated focus. I’m actively trying to change that by focusing more on my maternal lines.
…It takes some digging to find female relatives and their stories. Usually, we find them in the documents in orbit around husbands and fathers.
…Here are my top ten tools to find maternal lines: [see link above]
…Patriarchy is not “normal” for humans, and not all human societies throughout time have been patriarchal. Authors Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan convincingly argue in their 2010 book Sex at Dawn that both sexes of pre-historic humans were likely highly promiscuous, within egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. And author Wednesday Martin, in her recent book Untrue aims directly at the myth of supposedly faithful females being less interested in sex than their supposedly more promiscuous and sex-motivated husbands.
…One can imagine a vastly different scenario for sex if land and titles were inherited through the maternal lines. There would be no need to police women’s sexual choices because maternity is never in question. One never wonders “Who is the mother?”
…A rational theory of liberation genealogy would assume that each ancestor has an equally important role in shaping one’s story, regardless of race, class, or gender.
March 2021
9 Minutes/19 Reads/51 Claps
Like many white people in the United States, I have a family story of Native American ancestry. While potentially quite interesting, for me to focus on that story and ignore my European ancestry denies history.
Ten years ago, I joined an online genealogy website with a few goals, including finding out which Native American tribe an ancestor came from. As I became better at researching, I discovered a big difference between the simplistic stories I had in my head and the reality that my ancestors lived.
…The short answer is I am overwhelmingly white and European, and I need to come to terms with that before I focus on any other ancestries I might have. I’m white.
…For me to have been fascinated by a potential tiny fraction of Native American ancestry, while ignoring my white ancestors, is part of the problem in this country.
…I challenge everyone to learn about the treaties that transferred the land we live on into private and public property.
August 2021
6 Minutes/69 Reads/51 Claps
My DNA says that I am likely descended from people who owned people and from enslaved people. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?
I am about as white as I can be. But, how did I end up with one percent of my DNA matching with people from Cameroon, the Congo, and Western Bantu Regions?
…So Benjamin B Bruce (born 1799) was white enough to pass as white in some of the censuses, but had enough African ancestry to be listed as “colored” in some of the censuses. He was also listed as “free,” and his profession was listed as “cooper.”
It is almost certain that even though he was listed as free in 1840, Benjamin would have had recent enslaved ancestors, and perhaps he was born enslaved.
…This is where my genealogical question intersects with the history of race and slavery in this country. Although there are a wealth of documents and family trees available for white colonists, people of African ancestry have next to nothing.
…The systematic erasure of non-white stories means that we end up having to generalize about the stories of enslaved ancestors.
…I can’t ignore my DNA.
I use my study of family history to hold up a mirror to myself and how my family and I were shaped by history. Sometimes I don’t like what I see in the mirror. I don’t like that I am descended from people who enslaved other people.
…What can I do with my knowledge of my African ancestry? First, I can acknowledge the fact that I most likely am descended from a white person who owned black people. I will keep digging into this personal history. Second, I can learn the general history of that time period from multiple perspectives, especially what life might have been like for my enslaved ancestors. Third, I can work in the present to prevent further injustice to Black people in the United States. And lastly, I can support efforts to repair the damage to families done by slavery, knowing that at least one branch of my family directly benefited from the enslavement of others.
May 2021
9 Minutes/15 Reads/50 Claps
What makes us distinctly human? Understanding adolescence is key.
I want to look closely at the differences between my modern human ancestors and their cousins, my Neanderthal ancestors.
…This was a key moment because as these two species of early humans encountered each other, the physically weaker modern humans began to displace the physically stronger Neanderthals, even as there was some interbreeding. This process took about 5000 years until the last enclaves of distinct Neanderthals disappeared.
…To me, the most intriguing theory centers on the importance of adolescence and elderhood to early modern human communities.
Much of the speculation about the advantages held by modern humans focuses on differences in social grouping size between the two species. Research shows that Neanderthals stayed in small direct-kin groups of 20 to 40 people, while modern humans lived and moved in larger groups, likely 100 to 150 people (as proposed by evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar). In an encounter between Neanderthals and modern humans, the larger groups might have had an advantage, possibly because these modern humans had a secret weapon: adolescents.
…Larger groups had advantages, but the larger group size meant that modern humans had to cooperate beyond immediate kin groups, and thus there were likely strong selection pressures for social skill development.
…Adolescence is a time of intense creativity, risk-taking, and extreme sensitivity to social information. Those are prime traits needed to develop social skills and to adapt to new situations.
…There is a flip side. For every in-group, there is an out-group. The sensitivity and focus needed to form functional social groups means that we are also primed to exclude people who do not belong.
…Scientists talk about this type of thought as “mentalizing,” and they postulate that mentalizing is key to the ability of modern humans to develop complex social networks.
Mentalizing allows the thinker to imagine reality as perceived by another person.
…In addition to an extended adolescence, modern humans lived 20–30 years longer than Neanderthals, with a new class of elders providing wisdom and knowledge for community survival.
…Extended adolescence is the most recent addition to human development, and adolescence still feels like a primal, untamed period of life. This knowledge helps me have patience with the young adults I work with. The fact that many people are functionally stuck in early adolescence also helps me make sense of current events. The past illuminates the present.
September 2021
6 Minutes/35 Reads/28 Claps
An essay on the importance of getting details right when doing family tree research.
When I am building a tree for myself or other people, I can use hints to bounce from one census to another.
…Having a rare last name is a gift to genealogists like me.
…For my Lovekamp side, I hit the jackpot. They have a rare name, they lived in a small town in Illinois, I had a typewritten family tree from my dad with birth years on it, and as good German Lutherans, they all had multiple middle names.
…There is such a thing as too much confidence.
…All of the work I had done to build these elaborate trees with branches and sub-branches came tumbling down around me. I systematically erased every profile until I was back to my great grandfather, Elmer Adam Ludwig Lovekamp, and then I rebuilt the tree.
October 2021
8 Minutes/27 Reads/12 Claps
This essay tells details from my great-great-grandmother’s immigration story.
Discovering some of those [immigration] stories has brought me closer to my family, and also given me a path to empathy with people who are experiencing their own immigration stories right now.
…When I hold up a mirror to myself, I see a widow crossing the ocean with five children. I see a family full of people who struggled and made sacrifices. I see aunties who scrubbed floors and washed clothes. I see heartbreak and resilience. I see strong faith amid many reasons to lose that faith. I see interdependence, with a reliance on extended family, other Germans, and the church.
Many of the immigrants on the US’s southern border are mothers with young children, like my great-great-grandmother was when she made her journey. Others are minors, like my grandfather’s aunt Mamie, who was barely 16 on a ship bound for America.
…To deny immigrants basic human rights is to treat immigrants as less than human, and this hurts me too. It hurts because to classify any person as less than human calls into question my own humanity, my own right to be called human, and it makes my membership in the human race conditional.
March 2022
9 Minutes/12 reads/8 Claps
National and ethnic identities are very loosely connected to DNA. There is nothing like purity among any distinct European ancestry population.
When I first got my DNA test over 10 years ago, I was surprised at the amount of Scandinavian DNA that the testing site said that I had. Even though I live in Wisconsin where Norwegian and Swedish last names are everywhere, my family has no direct links to those Nordic countries.
…It turns out that every one of my grandparents’ lines have Sweden, Denmark, and/or Norway in them, despite none of the lines having any recent direct ancestors from any of those places (going back at least 5 generations).
…If my ancestors on my father’s mother’s side hailed from Northern Germany in the Osnabrück region near Hanover, there is a good chance that that region was plundered, pillaged, conquered, settled, or otherwise impacted by Vikings many times over the course of 1000s of years.
In Great Britain and Ireland, the history of the various conquests and raids of the British Isles is written in the DNA of the people living there today. Any base population “from” the British Isles might have mutations associated with Celts, Britons, Picts, Welsh, Scots, Saxons, Danes, and up to a dozen other ethnic groups.
…As much as I love having a DNA connection to the fictional protagonists in some of my favorite TV shows, the look at the history of Europe has me questioning any lingering belief that any ethnic group is better or worse than any other ethnic group. First, ethnic groups are not homogeneous. And second, there is too much morally ambiguous history for any one ethnic group to warrant anything close to pride. I am a mutt, descended from mutts, some of whom had some Viking ancestors, who were likely mutts themselves.
October 2021
6 Minutes/27 Reads/4 Claps
One of my favorite parts of genealogy work is learning about the occupations of my ancestors.
How learning about a working-class ancestor has shaped my view of myself.
…One of my favorite ways to develop a picture of an ancestor is to look for documents to help me find out about their occupations.
… In Pittsburgh in 1865, Peter was one of a half a page of Prices, and they listed him as a “Puddler.” In the subsequent yearly directories he was either a “Puddler” or “Boiler” until 1876, when the directory only listed his address, with no occupation.
…The puddler transformed brittle “pig iron” into malleable “wrought iron” through a complex and artful boiling process that removed impurities and transformed the iron.
…Puddler was a skilled job that was often passed down from fathers to sons. Peter came from Wales, one of the homes of Britain’s mining and iron industries during the Industrial Revolution.
…I’m proud of these hard-working people. The details in the documents show some of the hardships they faced. It was a different time. I’m glad that we have workplace protections and OSHA standards now. Likewise, for Peter and Jane to outlive six of their ten children, also makes me appreciate modern medicine.
May 2021
6 Minutes/43 Reads/1 Clap
Family tree research is a way to honor people in our families who did not make it home from war. By collecting photos, documents, and stories, we keep memory alive, and we are reminded of the awful costs of war.
May is the month when we remember those who have died in the service of our country. For me, May holds an additional significance, because it is the anniversary of the death of my uncle Buddy, who was killed in Vietnam a little over a year before I was born.
…Years later, as my skills as a genealogist grew, I discovered many documents related to my uncle’s service and his death. Each document helped build a picture for me about a time in my family just before I came along.
…I cannot look away from the impact of war and the trauma of loss on my family. To look away might make me numb to the loss felt by families today when they lose a family member in an armed conflict or afterwards to PTSD and suicide. Memorial Day is here to remind us of the cost of war and for us to not engage in war lightly.
February 2021
12 Minutes/19 Reads/1 Clap
To be an American with European ancestry is to inherit a nation built on stolen land and stolen lives.
Ancestry research has taught me to accept the truth for what it is. The documents don’t lie, and I can’t make my family history to be anything other than my truth.
…the research also points me to places where my white ancestors got a leg up due to the privilege of living in a country both built on land that was forcibly taken from the original inhabitants and also built on the forced labor of enslaved people. My awareness of this makes me believe we need policies to right the wrongs of our racist and colonizing systems.
…Sitting with the truth of my genealogy research leads me directly to the conclusion that reparations are due to Indigenous people and Black people.
… On some level, even if your particular ancestors were not beneficiaries of stolen land, the simple act of living in the United States means that they were complicit in and benefited from stolen land.
…As a descendant of working-class people, I can acknowledge their hard work, while also accepting the truth that wealth in this country is based on stolen land. These are not mutually exclusive.
…Even if I did not have an ancestor who enslaved people, I would still be a beneficiary of ancestral wealth created by slavery. The economies of the North and South were inextricably linked.
April 2021
6 Minutes/6 Reads/0 Claps
I want to use my own ancestry journey to understand the way assimilation to English works in society.
I want to reclaim the German language, both for my genealogy work and for myself.
The dominance of standard American English has pushed many generations of people to lose their ancestral languages and accents to assimilate. If we recover the languages of our ancestors, we may be rewarded with a richer life and a unique connection with our family heritage, while supporting others to do the same.
…There were waves of anti-German sentiment. Kids were bullied at school, and there was a need to be Americans first and Germans second.
Today, we see a similar strong pressure to assimilate for non-English speaking immigrants. Language assimilation has long been celebrated in the United States as part of the “melting pot” ideal.
…It is not just language. Assimilation affects every aspect of life: family structure, clothing, holiday traditions, sports, shared popular culture references, and even ways of thinking. Everything gets subsumed into American culture, which is a majority white space and a majority English-speaking space.
What is lost in this pressure to assimilate? A lot.
First, full assimilation has only ever been available to people who can pass as white.
…When a language is lost, it is not just words that are lost. Each word in a language is not just a translation of an English word.
…There has always been resistance to assimilation. Today, Native nations have been recovering their ancestral languages, saving the knowledge and culture embedded in those languages. These languages are born of the land and ecosystems of this continent, and they contain ecological wisdom in how to live in this place.
We are coming to a new understanding of America, not as a melting pot, but as a mosaic.
The following three essays were from the beginning of this journey. I wrote them for Facebook and eventually a friend suggested Medium.
February 2021
10 Minutes/24 Reads/0 Claps
To end patriarchy we need to see it. When I look at my own ancestry, documents that reflect the patriarchal systems are everywhere. Likewise, my DNA test shows 2% Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. That part of my tree has been lost. To end anti-Semitism we need to see Jewish people.
Ancestry research can be a mirror that reflects the truth about family history.
…If I want to be part of creating a just world, where everyone has equal opportunity and the planet is protected for future generations, then I need to look at my own history with a critical eye. How did I get here?
…I suppose there is a fine line between using my place of relative privilege as a white, male, heterosexual, Protestant, USer to try to contribute to the dismantling of white supremacy culture and just being another man-splaining blowhard. Please accept that I am trying to be the former, while I might unintentionally stray into the latter.
…Patriarchy is in the air I breathe. I was raised to be a Gaertner and not a Myers or a Roll or a Lovekamp. Patriarchy is important to me because it has been important to people around me for a long time. It is time for that to change, but to dismantle patriarchy, we need to see it. It is obvious in the family history documents.
…If the documents are a mirror, then the documents are reflecting back patriarchy at almost every level.
…Those expectations of patriarchy can be harmful to men as well. In looking at a family tree, I know when the wars happened. As I look at the documents, if a young man in the tree is born about 20 years before a war, I get a jolt of concern in my lower back. I see those wars as bottlenecks for the young men who lived through them.
…What is my role in ending systems of male domination? I guess the first thing is to see them. This also applies to all other systems of oppression.
…I am ashamed to say that in my small town Wisconsin childhood, most of the Jews I met were in the Bible, and so they were part of history, in much the same way that I learned about Native people.
When I did eventually meet real Jewish people, I think my approach to Judaism was sort of akin to my childhood approach to Black people (again, I am ashamed to say this). I considered myself “colorblind” and, by extension I guess, “Jew-blind.” I didn’t see color or religion. All people were equal and good, and I didn’t care if you were different. Just like colorblindness is now revealed to be another way to allow the racist system to continue to exist, Jew-blindness is also keeping Christianity in a dominant position within the system. To be colorblind is to ignore the lived reality of Black and Brown people and ignore their history and culture. Jew-blindness is a similar sort of erasure. For me to really look at my family history, I want to unerase that part of me. I want the whole history.
…In today’s society, Jewish people continue to be set up to be the scapegoats and take the blame. If we stopped that, then the blame would likely be appropriately placed, and it might lead to real liberation for all people. By continuing to misidentify Jewish people as the cause of oppression, it allows the actual oppressive structures to stay in place.
January 2021
2 Minutes/6 Reads/0 Claps
European ancestry is intertwined with whiteness. If I want to see who I am I need to understand both.
If you are like me, it is possible you haven’t thought of being white as a major part of your identity… This lack of connection to my whiteness is a privilege that people with more melanin do not have as an option.
In order to de-center whiteness, it might take a period where it seems like I am centering whiteness.
For me, that means owning my whiteness. To be white is to have European ancestry. So this week, I have been watching John Green’s Crash Course series on European History.
