Recently, I’ve come to a unique perspective that many genealogists find as their spur forward into doing the research. In fact, you can call it the driving force behind modern day genealogical research. I know it was mine.
“My (grand)parents never talked about their (insert relatives[s] here).” This is something that I’ve heard a lot. It was either their parents, if they are old enough, or their grandparents. They just never talked about who-is-who. I can’t say if this was a coincidence that developed over a couple of generations but it certainly did give cause for the rise of, now, one of the most popular and fastest growing hobbies, probably ever.
Given my experience, I have an interesting way of thinking in a third person perspective. This helps me to overcome some obstacles on occasion when appropriate to do so. I’ve developed this practice by removing myself from the situation and thinking about personal things that have happened to me and learning how to deal with tragedy and disappointments. I’ve learned how to deal with a lot of unfortunate things that have become life-course altering in their advent. It’s now also given me a most plausible answer as to why earlier generations have sometimes left nothing for the future generations about the family.
You think that your life was tough? You think that your life could have been better and sometimes finding that you wish it had? Everyone has had this thought cross their mind at least once in their life. Consider someone who was born c. 1920 and died c. 2000. They lived for about eighty years and seen a world war, numerous other wars, politics at its best and worst, and have seen technology go from the Model T cars of Henry Ford to Compact Discs that hold gigabytes of information. Their life in the recent century was wrought with fear of the Cold War period and the uncertainty that life as a whole has presented with the ever changing world around us.
But why leave dozens of photos unmarked? Why never talk about their own grandparents or even siblings? It does not seem unreasonable in the slightest that they were as concerned about simply surviving life for as long as possible and gave little thought to preserving their own history. Every family tree has some nuts and fruit. Not to forget about the skeletons hanging around too. I’ve met some great people in my years doing this. When asked, they were able to share with me stories of brothers they lost in WWII and other conflicts. Of grandchildren and children that died from drug overdoses or conflicts. Some even knew of a cousin that murdered someone and went to jail for life, never to be seen again.
One of the worst problems is that of abuse, of any kind. Who wants to talk about someone that abused them? If the father was abusive to the children, they didn’t exactly have a good relationship. That would kill the interest in genealogy for most people before it even started. What isn’t considered is that there has been a lot of studies done in regards to the fact that there was a very real cause behind that abuse. I’m not making excuses for why it happened, but stating that the abuser had a problem and the abuse was their way of dealing with what happened to them.
These things are not easy for us to deal with but as a genealogist would know, we want those stories told and shared. We want to preserve as much of our history as possible. It isn’t always that easy though. We want to see the past through rose colored glasses and marvel at how they survived on a farm through periods like the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. How they didn’t have the medical technology we do today and lived through epidemics that swept the nations.
All of my own grandparents are gone. I am now becoming old enough that my cousins and I are now the grownups and our parents are the elders of the family. There is no one left alive to even try and identify the people in photos I have from the the 1930’s or 1950’s of people who were very elderly. No names, no notations, nothing. It is a common hurdle that must be overcome. If it can’t be overcome, then it’s labeled as a brickwall that we pray will one day be broken down.
Perhaps the people who lived before us didn’t know? That is not without cause as well. Adoptions, internal feuds, and the simple breakdown of communication is also the cause of many family members losing touch. after a generation or two, the knowledge of any other family simply disappears. They didn’t write letters to each other and even today with over a dozen ways of keeping in touch, people still have a hard time talking to their family. Emails, cellphones, texting, and social networking isn’t enough. Most people today won’t talk to those outside of their immediately family and are more likely to know everything about their friends than relatives.
There is something that can be done about it. Not everything is lost to time itself. Genealogy research, as a profession or hobby, does make every attempt possible to solve this problem. There are ways to discover who is in that picture. There are ways to uncover the secrets of our past. There are ways to overcome these hurdles. For the person that knows what their ancestors, of any generation past, has lived through should bring about a sense of acceptance that we are not alone in our struggle to survive this thing we call life.
