Over the past several years of blogging here, I've alluded to my avid interest in genealogy. I've done a lot of work in putting together our family tree file over the last dozen or so years, and it has been fascinating. It has deepened my interest in the history of this country as well as that of England. It adds more depth to your perception of history when you know your ancestors by name, and you know where they lived and died, as well as how they lived and died. It gives more meaning to history when you know that your forebears lived in certain places at certain momentous times. It personalizes history for you.
I often find it unfathomable that many people have no interest in their ancestors. Although it seems that genealogy has become more popular since the advent of the Internet, there are still people who are indifferent to the idea of knowing their ancestors, or even their general ancestral origin. The people who often say ''I'm an American and that's all I need to know'' are often the ones who disdain genealogy.
Some people see genealogy as elitist, believing it holds interest only for people with aristocratic pedigrees -- or those who wish for such a background.
Most of the same people who lack interest in their own family tree are the same people who say that they feel no affinity for their ethnicity/race; they are often the aracial, deracinated types who have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the idea that people are people, and any differences are only skin deep. We all bleed red, etc.
One of the interesting things about having one's family tree posted on the Internet as I do is receiving messages noting that so-and-so in the United Kingdom, or Australia, or New Zealand, shares some ancestors with me. These people are able to check their information against mine, and, ideally, to fill in some of the gaps that inevitably exist when you are putting your family tree file together. In any case, these distant cousins can verify the information I have in many instances, as well as vice-versa.
Occasionally these people message me. That's always interesting.
When I read news stories, or blog pieces, relating the news of what is happening in the countries of our kin, such as the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere, it becomes all the more personal to me, realizing that I have cousins -- albeit unknown to me personally -- in those places. The destruction that is being done in Western countries everywhere is being done not to random strangers, but to people who carry some of the same DNA as my own. They are my kin, not just in a vague, metaphorical sense, but in a real way, a flesh-and-blood way.
Maybe some people find that connection too tenuous or too abstract for them to care about it, but I find it compelling.
I wish that others could feel the same connection to our cousins across the oceans as I feel.
To many 21st century Western people, their family consists only of their immediate family circle, of parents, children, and spouse, with a few others included. However in my generation growing up in the South, the family included many, many people. It included third and fourth cousins as well as closer relations, and it extended to the older generations, great-grand-aunts and uncles. The family reunions were lively gatherings that I looked forward to, and anticipated happily, when I was a child. Now as the older generations pass on, the extended family has less cohesion as the younger ones drift away geographically as well as emotionally. This is sad, and it's part of what is happening to all of us as a people.
We've become so atomized, and this is part of the reason why we are so easily dominated and possibly to be conquered -- unless things are reversed soon.
There is strength in numbers. We need to regain our connections to our larger family, as well as to our folk. And this means not just the living generations who may be scattered, but the generations that came before us. Our family and kin group means those more distant in time as well as those distant in space.
Genealogy and the sense of who we are, specifically, in the context of our family and folk, is something that we are in sore need of today.
