I’ve been wrapped up with researching family genealogy stuff lately. I’m a complete beginner in this little hobby and am paying for no website memberships or services, yet my mind is boggled by the stuff that’s out there. How the internet can be used for literally everything, including discovering random relatives from hundreds of years ago who did nothing especially notable with their lives.
The project isn’t really driven by familial feelings for me. I could count on one hand the amount of relatives I would ever go out of my way to see again. They always say “blood is thicker than water” or whatever, but totally miss the full quote about blood being shed with your fellow soldiers is more significant than the water from the womb.
Living life with people and loving them for who they are regardless of where they came from is what connects you to them, not happening into their bloodline.
It’s more about the history for me. If my life were to be some natural disaster in a history book, what stories would the previous pages tell?
It may sound like I’m saying “tomaytoes, tomottoes,” here, but it’s different in my mind somehow.
It also feels like solving a mystery. Combing through online records, searching for clues. It’s slow, it’s tiring, it’s maddening.
I’ve only made it to my great great great grandfather, and then I slam into a wall. I can tell you his name was Aaron and he was a farmer-turned- textile factory-worker. I can tell you he was of medium height, medium build, black hair, gray eyes. I can tell you by the time he was in his forties, he was missing part of his first finger on his right hand, and had a chronic tremor near his right shoulder. But I can also tell you that the first official record of his existence didn’t happen until he was twenty-five and living as a boarder with another family. I can’t find a single thing about his parent or if he had any siblings. It’s making me lose my mind, and I wish my great grandfather were still around so I could pepper him with questions.
Something’s gotta be out there somewhere. I’m continuing to dig and slam my face into the keyboard.
And that’s just one type of frustration.
On the other side of my family, I found this girl named Elizabeth. There’s a photo of her and everything, which makes it feel even more personal. She died at sixteen in the ’40s. After more digging, I was able to find the death record. There’s the line right before me titled “Cause of Death,” and that little line is filled out, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it says. I can’t decipher the handwriting.
It’s not pertinent information. It’s not withholding me from furthering my research like the other scenario, but I just want to know. I see her smiling back at me from the black and white photo and all I can think is, “what terrible thing happened to you to take that all away?“
Watch me slam my face into the keyboard again.
Much like the act of writing, I kinda despise it all, yet it keeps calling me back and I pick it up once more.
I’m invested now. These people are slowly becoming real to me as their lives slowly piece together. But all I have is records and documents. There’s only so much I’ll ever get from that. I’ll never know the way Aaron told stories or what types of things made Elizabeth laugh. I’ll never know what they wished for in their lives or at the local general store. I’ll never know who they were as people.
And that’s kind of a terrifying thought to me. That all they’ve become are just some names on a page and quick life summary defined by where they lived, how they made a living, and who they lived with.
The cold fact that after you’ve been dead a while, no one remembers who you actually were. It makes all of life seem so small and insignificant. Here, gone, and forgotten multiplied by several billions.
I mean, that’s the way of the world and it is what it is and always will be.
It’s not that I think so highly of myself that I feel like everyone should know and remember who I was, but it’s sobering to think that in not too many years, no one will.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes it can feel like the whole world is sitting at this table with you. That the eggs and toast and computer screen your eyes see make up this big part of the universe because it’s such a big part of your own personal universe, when in actuality, they’re nothing. Spilling your coffee on your new white shirt right before an important meeting is nothing. Sitting in traffic for two hours on the way home from a hellish day at work is nothing.
We’ll have forgotten all about it within a year, much less the whole history of time.
How small we are. How easily we’re forgotten.