Published:
05/26/2013 04:59pm
Warts & All: That's How I like my Genealogy
Warts and all. That’s how I like my genealogy. I started doing family research more than three decades ago motivated by an appetite for history and affection for my beloved maternal grandmother Kate. Kate, born into the societal propriety of the dawning twentieth century, survived a turbulent childhood punctuated by parental indiscretion, death and desertion. She carried her parents’ shame as if her own and, no wonder, subscribed to the maxim that one should not air their dirty linen in public . . . nor rattle family skeletons in an attempt to bring them back to life. Notwithstanding the mitochondrial DNA that Kate and I shared, I was clearly born without that reticence gene when it comes to unearthing family history.
While I never could have predicted or even imagined the discoveries I would make and the people I would meet on my genealogical journey, I can say that being equally open to the good, the bad and the ugly of things made the trip infinitely more intriguing and resonant for me. My Irish story is sorely lacking “triumphs,” beyond the basic achievement of my ancestors having survived their hardscrabble lives both in Ireland and Jersey City. And while there is something to say for ancestral accomplishments and the family pride that comes with those, in my experience, it is the tragedies and the disappointments of their lives that prick our hearts like a nettle, bring poignant imaginations to our minds and join our souls in communion with theirs. Whether we admire them for their successes and character or for their dogged perseverance in the face of repeated setbacks and questionable life decisions, we know we owe them our very lives and, either way, they have our gratitude and we are the continuation of their existence.
Case in point, my grandmother Kate’s long-hidden secret about her mother (my great-grandmother), Mamie Flannelly, born in Jersey City in 1878 to Irish immigrant parents: Mamie had a baby son out of wedlock in 1898. (Please refer to paragraph one above, “parental indiscretion.”) Despite often asking Kate about her childhood and her Irish family, starting when I was a teenager and first curious about genealogy, it was some years before she shared that shameful secret, a burden she had been carrying around like a niggling kidney stone since that very childhood. When she did, in the midst of the sexual revolution, hippies, and the first man walking on the moon, I quickly told her, with great conviction and specific examples, that her mother’s indiscretion paled in comparison to the routine goings-on in the late 1960s, although I doubt that gave her any real comfort or changed her perception of her mother’s fall from grace.
Kate passed away in 1988 taken by the cruel effects of Alzheimer’s. Although she no longer knew me when she died, she has never left me and the search for her story (and so mine) has impacted me and the direction and wanderings of my life’s journey. Nearly twenty years after Kate’s passing, I conquered the elusive history of her Irish ancestry and, unable to sit next to her and offer up her own special episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, I found myself writing it down as if telling it to her as I had meant to. That became my first book, Past-Forward: A Three-Decade and Three- Thousand-Mile Journey Home. One reader called it a “love letter” to my grandmother. I like to think Kate would have seen it that way but, thinking back to her “dirty linen” lectures, perhaps not.
As it turned out, the journey of Kate’s secret was not then over and so many years after she told it to me, it would be revealed to another family, bringing them new knowledge and understanding of their own beloved grandparent. Just a few months after Past-Forward was released, the first season of Who Do You Think You Are? was generating a new wave of interest in genealogical research and that naturally resulted in an influx of new users on Ancestry.com. Ever the genealogical snoop and knowing that no matter how much you find out, there i
