Where I Come From Is not Who I Am
The search for ancestral roots and identity can be about who not to look up to
I’ve found out a lot about my ancestry while researching a book on my family lineage. I finished my maternal lineage in autumn of 2019. I am currently working on my paternal lineage, though I’ve hit some speed bumps due to COVID and my own health issues. However, it’s been a useful detour in that I’ve found additional tools via genetic genealogy while working on the second volume that I hope to go back to for a 2nd edition of volume 1 at some point. It’s all been very fulfilling — even finding out that my ancestors may have been less benign than we’d like to believe.
The winners write the history books
If you research back far enough, which isn’t very far at all, you’ll find that records are incomplete. So the ones we do still have, they were for people deemed important enough to keep records for. They were the winners, the powerful, the conquerors. One of my ancestors is Governor Stone of Maryland — his role in the adoption of slavery in the new colonies is somewhat controversial given the current political climate but very well documented. Another of my ancestors is Major John Mason, whose claim to fame is the very thing some argue never happened — the slaughter of the indigenous…
