How Important Is Knowing Your Origins?

Certainly. If a guy never learned that he came out of his mother's womb but went through life believing that he was brought by the stork, he would be seriously messed up.

My sister, bless her heart, has done some geneology on our family and has found through her research that we are descendents of French aristocracy. It's my opinion that her research is dubious at best and I never take her interpretation seriously. She does. It confers a great deal of pride for her coming from our "white trash" roots. I cringe every time she mentions it at family gatherings like it somehow elevates who we are now. It is obviously coming from her insecurity or shame of our family. It is something she believes to make her world make sense, a validation. A great deal of her self worth is wrapped up in that.

That said, I think geneology can be a source of great pride - however erroneous it may be in my sister's case, and it's great that you have learned a good deal about yourself and history in the process. I don't share your interest and feeling of importance of knowing your family history, however. I don't agree with your statement that not wanting to know the past is ignoring who you ultimately are. And I don't agree with your belief that we are inextricably tied to our genetic lineage. I am myself and I live today. My history that directly affects me ends with my mother and father and maybe my dead grandparents whom I never knew. Knowing I am a descendent of aristocracy does not affect me one way or another. That is probably a lie anyways. Knowing what mistakes my ancestors made does not change my present in any way whatsoever or my understanding of myself. Who I am as a person TODAY is not defined by them. If it does I'd be eating possum and living in a trailer park. Unlike you, knowing what and who they were has no bearing on how I have come to define myself. You might say that past has been severed by my family in some way, perhaps intentionally.

I think the greatness of being American is the possibilty of reinventing yourself and not being tied to your past. Immigrants came to reinvent themselves to leave suffering and poverty and achieve a better life. That act alone has a way of putting less emphasis on your past. They were not encumbered by the rules of the Old World where your past and lineage often was the sole determinant of your social and economic status in life and that of your progeny.

It honestly wouldn't suprise me if I had been adopted. I'm sure my parents love us but the always showed so little interest. Their own lives were more important than ours.

I started doing some genealogy research a few years back and it became a bit of hobby for me (not that I intended it to be one). Got as far back as 1653 on my fathers side and a few skeletons on my mothers side . Out of 11 generations myself and my brother are the first ones to break with tradition by not going into the maritime world.

My father also adopted my mothers 3 kids (from previous relationship) and treated them like his own. To him we were all part of one family and that no one is better than any of the other siblings.

I guess I take after my father's side when it comes to my sense of loyalty to my family and friends.

You didn't grow up not knowing your origins, you grew up being lied to and that produces many more issues than simply not knowing.

You'd like MY family history then!

I think it depends on how far back you go.

Just knowing that you're a Hutu or a Tutsi, English or Irish, Sunni or Shiite or Kurd, Red-stater or Blue-stater, etc... that's all more or less completely useless.

Being able to trace your roots back to mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam (http://www.genographic.org), and realizing that we all come from exactly the same place, I think that's more useful.

Yep... my mom dug up some of that in my family history too. (slave owners, that is...) Then there is abandoned babies, alcoholism, criminals, victims of crime (murdered and left a wife with 4 children, and the children were taken away because she was unable to support them - this was the early 1900s after all), child abuse, etc. etc... Even my generation is not immune to this. One of my cousins is in and out of jail all the time. And I think another cousin is suspected of murder! We have this sort of thing, and then we have the extreme Bible-thumpers. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground - except for me.

Actually, I don't think my family history is really all that unusual. Most families are dysfunctional when it comes down to it!

Interesting, mais not important.

Let's see, I'm related to some king of England, can't remember which one although I remember he was really stupid. Kind of embarrassing to admit to. Also am 4th in line to be an Irish prince. Not that I'll ever see it. Found out recently that I'm related to Abe Lincoln. There was also a member of my family that was a great inventor, a very clever and high-tech thief. (1800's had high tech?!? ) He was also a murderer who managed to disappear into a new life and left no trace.

I think what really bothered me in not knowing all of where I came from is until I was in my mid 20's, no one in my entire family told me that I was Cherokee. It seems one side was embarrassed to be Cherokee, and the other side condemned it. When I found out, and found out to what degree, (1/4 Cherokee/ 1/16 Choctaw) and who our Cherokee relatives are, and also got my card, BOTH sides of my family blew a gasket and had all kinds of conniption fits!! And to this day, I continue to rub it in and flaunt it. It just really pisses them off!! Hehe. Even though we are a dying race, I am really glad to find out that I am a part of it.

"I am, in fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable."

You've just repeated one of the largest American fallacies. People can't reinvent themselves anymore than they can leave the past behind.

Immigrants to America may well have escaped some problems but most learned that new and larger problems awaited them. A few did become obscenely wealthy but many were mired in an even greater poverty than they experienced in the old world. In many ways these new Americans became more oppressive, more racist, more class conscious than the societies they left behind.

In my extended family tree, it's mostly those who did stay behind that ended up going the furthest. Running away is never a means of solving problems.

This escapist legacy has led to the disposable society that is America.

Oh the irony Earl!

Just be glad they left France when they did (chop chop).

I get the impression you think little of them because they were poor and uneducated. No one is saying you'd be eating possum in a trailer park any more than I'd be owning slaves or whatireallywant would be an axe murderess. Not all my ancestors were so glorious. My grandfather's family was dirt poor and a rich local family thought he was so bright they sponsored him not only through college but law school too. One of my middle names, Cadwell, was given to me in their honor. His wife's family were Czech, fresh off the boat at Ellis Island. I know little about them precisely because they were poor. They disowned my grandmother after she and her sister were in a car accident, my great aunt was killed, and they blamed my grandmother for it. That was cruel and petty and caused her a life of sadness. Still, they interest me.

We are who we make ourselves but we are made of who came before us as well. All our DNA, your face, hands, eyes, everything all came from those people. Physically and perhaps mentally, you carry on their traits because you are made of all of those who came before you. What you do with it is up to you but you cannot say that they are not part of you.

Which is precisely what you did at one point in your life. You're no more a possum eater than you are the yuppie that came to work in New York. You took what someone gave you, brain and body, and made it into someone new. That's your accomplishment yet it doesn't diminish the contribution of your ancestors, just as your change of life doesn't diminish the actions of your past. It's neither good nor bad. It's just what is. Hating our histories is like hating a phantom and all it serves is to sew the seeds of regret. We can't change our ancestors as we can't change our past. And though the past contributes to the present, the key is what we do with ourselves in the here and now.



That's quite wonderful! He sounds like a great man.

Very true! So many of our histories are a hodgepodge.

Over half of Europe has some royal or noble blood in them. The reason these lines stand out is because they are so well researched. Doing genealogical work is like trailblazing through a rain forest. You earn every step with a lot of hacking. The going is difficult, slow, frequently expensive and full of dead ends. The internet has made it vastly easier than it used to be but getting everything documented can be next to impossible. One church fire in Catskill, NY has likely ruined any chance of finding where my father's side of the family came from. We're going to have to rely on genetic testing to find the link.

When you run into a noble or royal or someone famous or very rich, suddenly it's like the jungle parts and there's an autobahn with an idling Ferrari. You can cruise down huge swaths of data because not only have the names and dates all been so thoroughly researched already, but you can even learn something about their daily lives, even find portraits! People you never would have thought of before suddenly become open to you. You're reading about the life of your umpteenth great grandfather, maybe you've even been to one of his castles! It's fascinating because the history is so alive and at hand.

So when people talk about their noble and royal relatives it isn't necessarily to show off, but the simple fascination of being physically connected to someone from 500 years ago whose name you can read, face you can see, home you can visit, and biography you can read. It's amazing.

In the back of my mind I thank all the people who managed to live long enough to reproduce a child who survived long enough to do that same thing just to result in me being here at all.

Genealogy at work in a positive way right there!

Well stated and very true.

as a child i was told my grandfather was run over by a train. as a young adult, i visited my grandmother in germany for only the second time (the second afternoon, actually) in my life, and it came out that she had, in fact, been a single mother. she passed away three weeks later.

when i confronted my mother (an intensely private person) about it, she said she planned to tell us at some point, but the time had never come.

the revelation was rather shattering. i know little about either side of my family, and everyone's dead except for my mom. they were from germany, so i imagine many of the records were destroyed in the wars.

it would be nice to know my origins, not to whack anyone over the head with, but to, as jason-els so eloquently put it, to feel the continuation of life, and to acknowledge the lives, triumphs and yes, the shames of those who came before.

I have my origins back to the 11th century. And I didn't inherit any of the money. Damn it! LOL!

It is interesting reading and its nice to know the family has been involved with helping others for the past 200 years or so. But it doesn't change who I am and what I believe in.