[or-roots] Genealogy and Family History

[CKlooster at aol.com]

I've done worked on my family lines since the early 1970's and it  
complimented nicely an interest in history and an inate curiousity.  It was  
frustrating, however, to have names and places and dates but no stories handed  down to 
flesh these ancestors out.  I was content with that until some  information 
about the support group called Adult Children of Alcohol  Parents and 
Dysfunctional Families  crossed my desk one day.  I  scanned through it because it 
pertains to my job...and suddenly something struck  me, so I read the material.  I 
realized then that whether or not we are  children of alcoholic parents and 
dysfunctional families, who and what our  ancestors were has a definite impact on 
who we are as people...and I'm not just  talking about brown eyes or curly 
hair.  Here is a story that was told  at a national mental health meeting that I 
attended:
 
A new husband watched fondly as  his young wife prepared dinner in the 
kitchen of their apartment.  She  placed a pot roast on the cutting board and 
carefully sliced it in half.   She then placed the meat in a roasting pan with one 
slice piled precisely on top  of the other and put it in the over.  Puzzled, 
the man asked why she'd cut  the roast in two.  "That's the way you cook pot 
roast" she replied, "My mom  makes the best pot roast and that's the way she 
cooks it.".  The next time  they were at his in-law's house the young man brought 
up the subject of pot  roast, "I'm curious about why you cut the roast in 
two." he said.  The  mother-in-law looked at him with a puzzled expression and 
replied, " I don't  know why it needs to cook that way, I guess because it cooks 
better.  My  mother always cooked hers that way.".  Once the subject had been 
raised,  there was much discussion and nobody had a definitive answer.  "I'll 
settle  this," the mother-in-law said, "I'll call my mother and ask her  why." 
  Grandma answered the telephone and the question was put to  her; there was 
a long pause and Grandma said, "I don't know why you cut the  roast in half, 
but I had to because I only had a very small roasting  pan.".
 
The point of this is that traits and beliefs and ideas are often passed  
along to us unwittingly.  One technigue taught by ACOA is to do a  family 
inventory.  You begin with the earliest ancestor that you know  and write down 
eveyrthing that you know about them...dates and places; how  many children in their 
family; how old their parents were; how old they were  when they married and 
began to have children; family legends;  occupation...everything you can think 
of.  For the furthest back ancestors  that may only be a name and a date and a 
place.  You work forward, taking  each person as an individual and writing 
down eveything you know or have  heard.  Once you have completed this task (and 
it's a lot more  difficult for those of us who've been doing genealogy for 
awhile) you start  looking at what was going on in the world at the time these 
people were alive  and thinking of how it may have impacted their lives.  I have 
an ancestor  who was in the Civil War.  At 25 he married a very young girl and 
 promptly moved with her to Indiana/Illinois where his parents lived.   
Leaving her pregnant and with his parents, he went off to war.  There  she was, 
young, pregnant, and living with her in-laws far from her own  family.  When 
Johnny came marching home again he stayed just long enough  for her to become 
pregnant a second time before he went off to  the silver mines of California 
leaving her behind still with the  in-laws.  It wasn't until several years later 
that he went back to Illinois  and gathered up his family to move them to 
Oregon.  I know only the barest  facts about this branch of the family, but after 
doing this exercise they became  more than just names and dates.  When I look at 
the lives of their children  I begin to see more of pattern.  It's 
interesting to see that some patterns  are traceable through a number of 
generations...sometimes right down to  me!
 
If you do this sort of exercise and make a timeline of what was happening  in 
the world, you can add quite a bit to the portrait of an ancestor who has  
only been a name and date.  A picture and a pattern often begins to  appear.   
Letters and journals and memoirs are terrific when you can  find them, but far 
too few ancestors leave us that sort of record. 
 
So yes, on this list we often digress, but those disgressions add to the  
history...even if the history is comparatively recent.
 
And, as can be seen by the number of facts that quickly appear as the  result 
of most queries, we actually do some genealogical research from time to  time!
 
Carla 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omls.oregon.gov/pipermail/or-roots/attachments/20050926/94d17bf2/attachment.html>