Finding your ancestral bread crumbs so you don't get lost.
Many of the stories we know as children have a moral wrapped up in the candy-coating of a good tale. Dragons and elves, wicked witches, nasty stepsisters and granny-eating wolves keep us listening to the ?fabulous yarns. We all have our favourites. The tales deliver insights into human nature-our jealousy, greed, selfishness, kindness, love, anger and sense of fair play.
If we pay attention to the stories of people's lives, genealogy acts in the same way. We can see how folks related to their presence here on earth, and we gain some understanding about the times they were born into.
A friend recently suggested that doing genealogy is like walking in the woods and trying to orient yourself so you don't become lost. After all, you have to retrace your steps or risk going round in circles.
So you figure out where north, south, east and west are, notice the position of the sun, and look for landmarks. Ah, that outcrop of rock with a clump of elderberry bushes below it-note that mentally because you should pass it on the way back.
Our personal presence, our own orientation, owes much to knowing our roots. People are caught up in change more rapid today than at any time in the past. We live in a dizzying spin where nothing seems to endure. Events gallop along, carrying us farther adrift each passing year. The strange thing is that, while our conscious minds may keep up with it all, our subconscious spiritual principle does not. Something in many of us flashes a little warning light that tells us we risk becoming lost in the chaos. In short, we could become so disoriented that we lose our deeper identity.
Imagine it like this. You and I are like a 21st-century Hansel and Gretel, and our parents (events larger than we can control or even imagine fully) have carried us deep into the heart of a large forest. For some, once they are lost in that thick woodland, it is the end of their trail unless they can find a way out.
In getting here, did we drop bread crumbs or pebbles to show us how to return home? In reaching our generation, did our ancestors leave clues along the way? They did, and if we can find those hints we too may orient ourselves and emerge from the bush.
Those hints are the paper trail left by our ancestors, and those who recorded events lifetimes before we existed in print or in memory, in stone or in artifacts. Perhaps those clues were like the bread crumbs, and a bird or mouse came and ate some of them up, or the wind scattered them astray.
People who look for those pointers to the personal past have to deal with the fact that documents, like the bread crumbs, may have been lost or stolen, destroyed or simply overlooked. We who embark on genealogy are a sort of Hansel and Gretel. We need to find the way, and fortunately for us there will be markers to help us.
Our compasses may be census returns, church registers, headstones or lists of passengers who sailed to the New World long ago. Our chronometer measures in decades and generations, centuries even. Our points of reference may be as bright as the sun or as dim and hard to see as a flickering star on a distant horizon. But each clue helps us get our bearings, and can show us the path to take. Genealogists are people who have taken up that challenge, and dare to seek.
Once we have seen into the lives of people whose genes and lore have helped to form us, we come to see that knowing these things about ourselves is very affirming. Yet, at the same time, it humbles us to realize more fully that each of us, despite our self-esteem and sense of individual identity, is a link in a chain stretching back farther than we can see, and whose end is somewhere before us in a place we shall never know.
Dr. Terrence M. Punch is the author of the recently published second volume of Erin's Sons: Irish Arrivals in Atlantic Canada 1761-1853 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2009).