Still Hidden in the Past

I have been working on some genealogy for a good portion of the past year. Mostly I am looking now for information about the "hidden" part of my family. It's not hidden because they are hiding; it's hidden because there was a disconnect over half a century ago that was never brought back together. So here I sit, all these years later trying to piece things together.

In many ways most of my family history on all sides is somewhat hidden. It's just that one part of it existed where I lived. The other part got lost in the disconnect because I didn't live there. For example, I do not know when my one grandfather died. I have a time period but that's it. It is a period of about 18 months almost 60 years ago. I can't find him in the Social Security Death Index because maybe he didn't have a Social Security number? His name has been spelled many different ways in different records (mostly caused by trying to read the writing and transcribe it) which only makes it more difficult.

I have contacted vital records in New York City but they keep asking me for information I don't have such as his parents' names and the missing Social Security number. They keep sending back my check and the application. I will try again, of course, trying to explain in more death why I don't have the information.

Ancestry.com has been very helpful in many ways but I've hit that dead-end over and over again. I put in his last name and get the death information on everyone in my family with that name- except his. I use wild cards in the searches and still nothing.

I keep going, hoping to have some connections and closures of things I wish I had been more aware of and interested in half a century ago. But when you are a teen to twenty-something there are other things you focus on. You go about your life and working on making it. Then, after deaths and disconnects and many years gone by, you realize that you are more than just an orphan from your parents' deaths over 50 years ago, you are now flowing a stream that has more unknown origins than you ever realized.

Will it be a disaster if I never know? Of course not. But I have learned that in one way or another I would like to find more of these roots so that I can pass them on. I have realized that I am not a self-created individual. I come from families, people and places, events and experiences that have combined in a unique way to make me who I am. It would be nice to know where some of that has come from.

If you have information on yourself and your family, I suggest you get it down on paper or somewhere to pass it on. It may seem insignificant today, but you never when- or who might think it interesting.

Just Thinking

When working on some of genealogical research the other week I had one of those moments when the world made a little bit of a shift. It comes with just a simple questions:

Why do almost exclusively self-identify with the "family" of our birth surname?

I was looking at my family tree and realized that just three generations back (my great-grandparents) I can potentially find as many as eight surnames and the one more generation (great-great grandparents) there would be sixteen. Does that mean I am as much a Klein and a Keller and a Freighley and a Ritchie as a Lehman? Then, by marriage I am also related to another whole set of family names on my wife's side. But without confusing it too much, just sticking with my direct ancestors, who am I?

This made me think back to a part of the Race exhibit that was here in Rochester a few years ago that was originally developed by the Science Museum of Minnesota. The basic point of it was that, at the very heart of who we are, we really are mutts. We are a mixture of ethnic, national, religious and probably racial parts. Genetic research is showing this truth at an even deeper level.

Another piece of the reality also goes to what portion of who I am is what national background. I know there are Ukrainians and Germans, Scottish and English back there. Because of ghettos in the Ukraine before 1900, that may be the greatest part of my heritage. Yet all these years I identified as of German background. And, since the Germans arrived here at least 80 years before the Ukrainians, that also makes me American, since here is where I was born. As were members of my family back at least five generations.

Maybe, then, for me it's time to even drop the hyphenated ethnicity and just be American.

See what I mean when I say it caused a slight seismic shift of self-identity.

Which brought me back to a discussion some of us were having on an ethics meeting about diversity. We finally got to the idea of self-identity. Different people talked about different ways of doing that. It struck me at that moment that my cultural identity is as much 60s Hippie Radical as it is a German-American or whatever. In fact, maybe even more so. A great deal of that ethnic identity has broken down in my life.

That wasn't true of my family. But perhaps being part of a religiously mixed marriage of the 40s and 50s helped move me the way I have.

So that's where it has taken me today. I look forward to the day when these issues are resolved in favor of being part of the one and only human race and where nationality is truly as a citizen of the world trying to keep our world from falling apart.

I think know that's what John Lennon was singing about.