This spring, I found a card sent to me as a child from my paternal grandmother. In addition to her usual expressions of love and advice, my grandmother suggested that one of my ancestors came across the ocean on the Mayflower. Having forgotten she had made such a statement, and wanting to personally connect with a significant part of American history, I spent the past few months tracing every line on her side to find the connection.
Shifting over a few contemporaneous branches on that same family tree, I was astonished to learn that the renowned poet of “Paradise Lost” and “Areopagitica,” John Milton, was my 13th great-grandfather. His heroic pieces likely paved the way for my feeble writing efforts. I echo Milton: “What is dark within me, illumine.”
Genealogy is more than genetics, and we aren’t simply a product of our environment. Those who breathed, ate, nurtured, drank, celebrated, mourned, and reproduced over the ages conceiving us had something to do with every inclination, impulse, attitude, prejudice, belief, and purpose emanating from our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Weave enough of our bloodline stories together, and we'll find a rich tapestry of scars and stars in the past capable of guiding us through our temporal challenges and pains to a bright future.
Sure enough, rather than allow for melancholy to set in, I started keeping track of family history stories during the lockdowns. Beyond notable mortals such as Massasoit, Mary, and Milton, I discovered marauders, martyrs, mythologies, and many Mormon pioneers preceding me. Despite the good-natured teasing from my kids as I relayed my findings over dinner and during car rides, we found genuine happiness in our genealogical experiment despite the occasional heartbreak in our grandparents’ experiences. Their hearts are turned to their fathers.
On my dad’s side, my great-grandfather made his way from a small village in northern Denmark to settle as a farmer and herder in southern Idaho 150 years ago. He was a stern man who lived a hard-scrabble life dependent on the rain and God’s good graces. His ruggedness was a vestige of our Viking forefathers such as Halfdan Sveidasson or the sea-king Sveidi of the Orkneyinga Saga.
Go back enough generations, and everyone is related to nobility from fiefdoms largely lost to time—but the reality of death throttles any feelings of superiority. War, political strife, and ravaged kinships during the rule of my 35th great-grandfather, Oleg the Wise, overseeing the rise of the ninth-century Kievan Rus, continue today. Some things never change.
In my high school U.S. history class, we were required to interview a living person about their experiences during the Great Depression. Fortunately, all four of my grandparents were still alive, and each of them left me a treasure trove of cherished memories from their younger years. They endured severe economic strife. Yet I was moved by how they lived with such joy even as the government implemented gas and sugar rations, drafted them to war in far-off places, and killed their livestock in a sordid attempt to stop inflation. How do our attitudes to hardships compare?
More than pictures on a page, my long-lost relations are very real intermediaries to a world of tradition and faith that becomes more beautiful the longer I study their lives. Like a rough stone rolling down the hill, their stories continue to refine my perceptions of history, constantly smoothing any sharp assumptions that I’m tempted to make about my very fallible forefathers. We find out quickly that they really weren’t that different from us.
Families who want to forge stronger bonds with their present kin should expose themselves to family history. Start with the easy stuff: Search the branches you know, and then make a goal to fill in the gaps—large or small—with the stories of men and women who literally animated you. And if your tree is devoid of substantial roots, start branching out by authoring your own story.
After all, it’s for the children.
