Learning from Genealogy

“I seek dead people”

My wife is an amateur genealogist. She spends her retirement researching her extended, extended family. She is a detail person, a puzzler, a rigorous researcher, and a writer. She uses all her skills pursuing records of her long dead relatives.

Giving gifts to support her passion is a challenge. I’ve considered books, but it’s like buying Sculpture for Dummies for Michaelangelo. I’ve settled on tee shirts and coffee mugs with dumb genealogy jokes, which, like telling consultant jokes to consultants, must get old.

Genealogy is history taken personally

Billie’s favorite TV show is Dr. Henry Gates’ Finding Your Roots on PBS. I sometimes join her watching celebrities reactions to unknown family stories. Children of immigrants learn their ancestors sacrifices; descendants of slaves, understand their horrific past in a visceral way.  Family stories touch us deeply.

At dinner, Billie sometimes overflows with a story:

“I can’t believe what this woman went through. In a twelve year period, she lost six children and had four who lived. Then her husband died. She married his brother and then two of their children died. Then they moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa. It was the early 1800s. Did they pack a wagon or walk?”

Or she’ll be frustrated with a puzzle she can’t work out:

“There’s no record of a Robert being born. He doesn’t show up in the 1850 census. He is nowhere in marriage records, but here’s his grave, death date 1864.”

Later, when she solves the mystery, she is like a six-year-old girl in a princess dress. “You won’t believe this. . . “

Side benefits for me

Billie did some research for my family reunion. I was amazed. For example, I’d thought both sides of my family immigrated in the late nineteen century. My mother’s and my father’s family actually arrived in the mid-1700s. I was hooked, not Billie-level, but intrigued.

She bought me an Ancestry.com membership and two DNA tests; I learned more. My mother’s grandfather was in the Confederate Army. My father’s grandfather and his brother, mustered into the Union Army of Indiana on the same day. These Blues and Grays were in different battles, but if either hadn’t survived I wouldn’t be here.

My DNA tests show 1% Cherokee DNA and a little snooping on Ancestry found that my great, great grandmother was the daughter of Chief Thomas and a white woman. Chief Thomas survived the “Trail of Tears” and died in Oklahoma.

My father’s family always steadfastly maintained they were English, but they were from west of the Rhine river, at various times German, French or Swiss land. I also have 3% Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, probably from that line, but I am unsure where. . . yet.

My paternal great, great, great, grandfather moved his family twelve miles from Hagerstown, Maryland to Franklin County Pennsylvania. Before then my last name was spelled variously Koller, Köller, Kohler. After the move it was spelled Culler.

Family stories

There is family lore that my father’s family were Huguenots, French Protestants, persecuted in their local area. Perhaps they were followers of John Calvin unwelcome in Catholic Alsace, Northwest Switzerland, or the Rhineland. Or was the persecution in Hagerstown, a German Catholic area, before they moved to the English dominated Pennsylvania? Or both?

Perhaps the most famous story I know of tracking ancestry from family lore is Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976).  Haley, a writer  (The Biography of Malcolm X) and screenwriter (Superfly),  heard stories about his ancestor, young Kunta Kinte captured next to a kuambe belongo (river), brought to Maryland and sold as a slave. Haley used family stories, language and cultural traditions to track his family history long before Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA. The Roots television miniseries opened Americans eyes to the horrors of slavery and the importance of oral tradition.

“I finally found you, you old African!” he exclaims in the final scene. Haley travelled to Gambia and found a shaman who had memorized members of the tribe. Before written language this is how genealogy, and all history, was recorded. Now we depend on family bibles, government records, family lore and maybe one genealogy “nut.”

Family records

Billie is her family’s generation recorder. She writes histories and distributes them to relatives who express gratitude, but rarely read them. It is an endless, thankless task.

I gave her a tee shirt:

“My work is done. I found everyone in my family tree and all my records are documented,    (said no genealogist ever).”

Occasionally, she vents about the sloppiness of some of her fellow researchers.

“How is it possible to record a person as the mother of another person, when the birth certificate shows she was born after her supposed child?.”

You can guess who manages our home records.

Learning from our history

How has genealogy enlightened me?

I was surprised that my father’s stories collapsed generations. The “four Culler brothers who immigrated to America and moved to Indianna” were four generations from the immigrants.

I asked Billie what she had learned. She replied, “that I am a grand amalgam of many people, who all lived lives while the history we read about – the founding of the country, the Civil War, the Depression – was happening around them. I am, we all are, a combination of all those people.”

“And yet,” I said, “we are each unique. We all get a slice of available DNA so my sister’s reflects my father’s side and I favor my mother’s Scots-Irish.

My family history, includes people who stayed in one place and those who moved families hundreds of miles in buckboards. There are families who prospered, and some who lost everything. There are stories of heartache and resilience. And, as Billie said, I’m connected to all of them.

Billie and I each discovered an ancestor family living in William Penn’s Philadelphia who may have been friends, a previously unknown connection between us. Perhaps if everyone studied genealogy we’d know we are all connected more than we imagine – each a unique leaf in the family tree of humankind.