Theme Song: Why We Tell the Story from Once on This Island
For all the ones we leave/And we believe/Our lives become the stories that we weave
The other day this woman came into the department with her father’s death certificate. She was roaming the net tying to find information about her deceased father’s mother. She came to me a couple of times requesting help till finally I said she should just go to the genealogy department where they had more resources (and patience) than I could give.
As I walked her to the elevator she told me that she was 70 years old and had no idea who her extended family was. Her mother was in her 90s and she asked her about the names but her mother told her it wasn’t any of her business to know. The nonagenarian told her if she wanted her to know, she would have told her.
The woman told me she didn’t get mad, she just resolved to come down to the library and discover the information for herself. Which, unfortunately, has not happened because there are still more pieces to the puzzle that she needs to gather before she can easily pinpoint him in the census and/or she needs to develop the patience to sit and scan through the census reels (online or off) to try to find the names.
Not every family is that hard, though. There are families who have at least one person who keeps tracks of the births, marriages, and deaths. They ask the questions; they write things down. They are labeled in the family as the nosy one or the gossip. Some keep the family secrets. A lot of people don’t see the point in the family historians, that is until they become curious themselves.
The main reason a lot of us are interested in family history its not to indulge in family gossip, but to find out more about ourselves. With the short time we are on this spinning clod of dirt we want to know that we are connected to something bigger than what we see. People seem to think that America/American history is made up of people who have done big things, but reallly the country is made up of people who just do ordinary things and live ordinary lives. Everyone wants to hear about heroes and they remember the fantastic things they’ve done. Those are the stories we thrive on, but they aren’t necessarily who we are as a people. In essence, we are just common people going about with our quotidian tasks. We are born, we live, and then we die and if we are lucky we get to have a lot of love in between. Our lives might be comfortable or uncomfortable and if we are lucky we get to leave a positive marker that we’ve passed this way.
In the mini series “Roots: The Next Generation”, the grandmother tells her grandson ”Family goes on in the flesh and in remembrance”. Family griots just want to put the flesh on the bones and the spirit into photos of the ones we are decorating our family tree.
