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.

Doing "Research"

Any writer will tell you how much time they feel they have to spend doing "research." That, of course, is the code word for that time spent doing myriad activities on the Internet that have absolutely no connection with anything we are actually writing. (Unless you are writing a blog post about wasting time er, research. That happened the other evening. I spent last week subbing at work for a colleague on vacation as well as several evening commitments. So, finally, with time to write I found myself doing "research."

Did you know that Wikipedia is a fount of research knowledge? It is especially useful on evenings like that and you remember, "Ah, yes, there is the "random article" link on the left sidebar.

So, with no further ado, here is what I found in but a few moments of deep and important research:

• Leucodynerus is a Nearctic genus of small sized potter wasps distributed in south western United States and northern Mexico.

• D47 may refer to:
• HMS Gabbard (D47), a 1945 Battle-class destroyer of the Royal Navy
• HMS Delhi (D47), a British Royal Navy World War II Danae class cruiser
• D47 road (Croatia), a state road
• and also:
• a DICOMED precision color film recorder
• the ICD-10 code for the other neoplasms of uncertain or unknown behaviour of lymphoid, haematopoietic and related tissue
• Semi-Slav Defense chess code

• In enzymology, a Z-farnesyl diphosphate synthase (EC 2.5.1.68) is an enzyme that catalyzes the chemical reaction- geranyl diphosphate + isopentenyl diphosphate \rightleftharpoons diphosphate + (2Z,6E)-farnesyl diphosphate

• The Wetterspitzen are three of the rocky peaks on a mountain ridge in the Wetterstein mountains in the central part of the Eastern Alps in Germany. They lie two kilometres, as the crow flies, southwest of Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze, on the border between the Austrian province of Tyrol and the German state of Bavaria.

• (24836) 1995 TO1 is a main-belt minor planet. It was discovered through the Beijing Schmidt CCD Asteroid Program at the Xinglong Station in the Chinese province of Hebei on October 14, 1995.[

• Man Push Cart is a 2005 American independent film by Ramin Bahrani that tells the story of a former Pakistani rock star who sells coffee and bagels from his pushcart on the streets of Manhattan.

See, I actually used all that information. The research time WAS fruitful.

Playing With History

Genealogical research has a certain unreality to it, especially when you discover minor things- or nothing at all. Perhaps that is why family myth is so powerful. It transcends facts, yet reaffirms them. It also shows, I think, the historic problem of record keeping. We have become so intent on making sure we have “the facts” and only “the facts” that we forget that it wasn’t that long ago facts were easily transformed depending on one’s mood.

For example, in looking at old census records I found that I couldn’t find anything about my mother’s parents prior to 1940. None of them, my mother included are easily found in 1930 or earlier. They were alive, of course; but they are like a ghost in the story to me. I searched and they weren’t there in 1930 or 1920 either. Going back to 1910- only a couple of years after arriving in the United States I came across a possible sighting, but the name is different, shortened and the immigration year is different from what I had found somewhere else. That will send me down another rabbit warren on my next exploration.

Now I have to go back to the immigration lists from Ellis Island and see of there might be another sighting of another name at another date. Crossing those waters in the 1900s did more than change location, it changed identity and gave one a whole new history.

But even my American-born grandparents aren’t found easily in 1900 just before they were married, even though they were both in their mid-20s at that point. The 1890 census was lost to a fire. They are there, at age 4 in 1880, though. Facts are not easily held on to. They are slippery and easily lost in the shuffle of time.

So we build our myths on what we know, have overheard, or just feels right. And thus our story is defined.