Family Tree and me: What about the stories?

A family tree is a wonderful thing to have, and a gift for generations. It’s a record of the people who went before you, and it will be a record of people who come after you.

But the thing about family trees is that they tend to lack an essential element: the stories. You might know where Great-great Aunt Edith was born, and where, and when; you might know who she was related to, who she married, and a list of the children she had.

Family cookies or just gossip?

But surely there’s more. Who was Great Aunt Edith? What did she look like? What was her personality? Was she a sweet old aunt who baked cookies for neighbourhood children, or was she a crotchety old bat? Did she, perhaps, have a questionable past that people gossiped about?

Where did she live? Was it in a grand old farmhouse on a farm now taken over by a modern housing development? Or did she live in another country, where she experienced the aftermath of wars, poverty, illiteracy, loss? What was her journey, and how does her story impact your own?

Family tree emotional DNA

Can you see personality traits of Great-great Aunt Edith in your own children? Do you think there’s such a thing as emotional DNA? Is her story one you want to share with your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? There are probably other characters in your family tree whose stories would be astonishing and fascinating if they were to come to life.

I know only a bit about my Irish ancestors and even less about the Norwegians on my mother’s side, even though they came to Canada only a generation ago. When I was a child and our Norwegian grandmother would visit, we didn’t ask her the questions I wish we had. She was a stoic, white-glove, needlepoint-handbag woman with an accent, beautifully dressed, elegant but a bit cold. I wish I knew her story.

If my mother were still alive, I’d ask about my grandmother’s history now. I’d record her comments with my little Sony recorder and get as much information as she could remember. And I’d save it. It would become part of my own archives of family history. But alas, I didn’t. I was young and trying to grow into an adult, and after that I was raising a family and just getting through life as we all do. Now it’s too late.

Angela’s Ashes

I remember my Irish grandparents and their understanding of the world around them. It was a small world, very Catholic, very Toronto; but their roots were Irish and had been difficult. When I read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, I could hear many echoes of my grandmother’s religious heritage ‒ her mother’s and father’s, grandmother’s and grandfather's lives in Ireland in a repressed church-dominated time.

I didn’t ask then, either. I was falling in love with every boy I danced with. I was going to school. I was navigating life as a teenager with my cousins and friends. And then all of a sudden I was married and having babies. There was no time for the past.

Here I am now with teenage grandchildren of my own ‒ grandchildren who at the moment don’t have time to know my story. I have had amazing adventures, difficulties, heartbreaks and triumphs. But my grandchildren haven’t time for this now ‒ of course they haven’t. Just as I once was, they are consumed with life, jobs, friends, falling in love, school, learning to drive. They don’t care about my story, and they shouldn’t ‒ not now, not yet.

We are family

But someday I will be gone and they will want to know. And I won’t be here for them to ask. And that’s why I think it’s important to record what we know, what we remember, what we feel, what we have experienced in the world as it is for us now.

If I write it for them now, my story will be here for them when they’re ready. They will learn history in a small but intensely personal way ‒ their own: their roots, their heritage. And some day they’ll want their own children and grandchildren to know,too.

We are family. We are history. We can’t lose our stories. They are our legacy.