Genealogy is a ride.
I grew up mostly around my mom's family. Except for holiday visits to my Grandma Dang (more often when she was in the care facility) and not quite as many visits to her sister Auntie Dang, the only family I knew was my great-grandma (Grannie Aw), a great-aunt (Awntie), grandparents (MamAw and PapAw), and all the many, many aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Aw family. Since we were all in a tiny holler in the Appalachian (appa-latchin, say it correctly, please) Mountains, it's cool to imagine us as a whole collective of possums. I sometimes do. Anyway. It was all really matriarchal, thinking back on it...I don't think I'd even considered that my mom's dad had parents himself, let alone where he might be from or what his life might've been like before he married my grandma and became swallowed by the holler that we called home. I could walk to their house, and to my great-grandma's, and I saw all the aunts, uncles, and cousins when they'd make their obligatory Sunday visits. This was the only idea I had of family until many, many years later.
I knew, in theory, that Dad's family came from New York. You could cut Auntie and Grandma Dang's Brooklyn accent with a knife. That should've been my first clue that there might be roots in my tree that reached beyond western North Carolina, but my brain chalked that up to "well, Mama did fall in love with a Yankee." Besides, even had I been interested enough to think beyond the immediate demands of teenage life, by the time I was old enough to consider Dad's side of my equation, he'd already been living in the holler for over a decade. He was practically a possum. Auntie and Grandma Dang had been in the area longer. Possums all. I did meet my aunt and cousins Dang once, when they came down for Grandma's funeral, but they were (and still are) living in the general burbs-and-surrounding-NYC area, so there weren't too many bonding opportunities.
So here we are, Adult Aw Dang (married name redacted), living in the suburbs of A City doing my Adult Life things like job and mortgage and work-life balance, and I think, you know, I don't have enough hobbies. I need more. I need one more thing to obsess over for a few months and then forget, but maybe this time, I can make it something that doesn't leave behind piles of unused supplies. That'd be good. Fortunately for me, COVID shut down everything including my job, so I suddenly found myself with tons of free time to find a new hobby (silver linings, people)! Shortly before my place of employment closed for the covid, a coworker who was super into genealogy was showing me how to use our library's access to Ancestry.com If you have any interest at all in genealogy, I would recommend seeing if your local library also has access to the Library version; it's basic, but I was able to trace back several generations, and you'd think that would be cool? And it mostly was? At first?
The thing about Ancestry is, people don't really need to provide proof for relationship claims. At first, I was falling all over myself linking up people in my tree with all these other ancestral profiles on other people's trees, and I was finding out all of this really wild stuff about my ancestors like: did you know that PapAw actually came from the coast of NC? I mean, of course you didn't. NEITHER DID I! His family has evidently been in VA/NC/SC coastal area since the late 1600s/early 1700s. MamAw's family has been in that area of western NC for around 200 years, and were among the first settlers in the region. That blew my mind. My history spans the entire state. And then I started tracing the Dang family line...and they've apparently been knocking around the NY/NJ area since around the same time! There are apparently historical landmarks in some towns in these states that bear the names of my forebears. Holy moly. SO! You can imagine my near disbelief when I traced my dad's line all the way back to...The Schuyler Family. Yes, that Schuyler Family (werk). I couldn't believe it. What?! But this family tree right here shows a clear line between my dad and Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy. I texted the coworker who'd been coaching me, gushing about my ties to Honest to God American Royalty. She was patient, and more importantly, she didn't make me feel like an idiot when she explained that very old historical records (like from the late 18th century) were handwritten and can often be difficult to read correctly. She encouraged me to look up the actual documents and see what they said. Long story short, I am actually descended from a family known as Schuh who did live in the same general area as the Schuylers. Did any of the family trees I was looking at on Ancestry have that link to the Schuhs, as opposed to the undoubtedly more famous Schuylers?
Nah.
This is not where the story ends, though; this is just the beginning. You see, I found another site that's much more rigorous about evidence. Wikitree is used by actual legitime do-this-for-money-and-leasure genealogists. I was even lucky enough to find a whole ass group devoted to Appalachian genealogy; when I joined their Discord server, I was immediately greeted by a dozen people saying hi and telling me the varying degrees to which we were related. Love those guys. Anyway! This was where I really got down to work, cleaning up everything I'd moved over from Ancestry, making corrections as needed, and researching even further back. I learned so much from so many lovely people who were patient (I'm using that word a lot, aren't I) and very, very enthusiastic about building onto The Tree (not like cult enthusiastic, god no. the good kind). I started filling out my own tree, adding in siblings to great-great-grandparents, filling out families of married-in aunts and uncles (no one still living, mind you. that's very frowned upon and rightfully so. privacy is too precious a commodity these days). I was learning and doing and researching and thinking, and then out of nowhere I found the First Troubling Thing.
See, the problem about finding a Troubling Thing is that you don't want to know more, but you also really want to poke at it. And the problem with poking a Troubling Thing is that there are always more and you will find them and if you poke them all you begin to Know Too Much and the thing about Knowing Too Much is that there's a measure of Ignorance that brings the joy in some hobbies. Do you know how many death certificates you look at in this hobby? Do you know how many questions you never had that start to have cloudy answers when you look at too many death certificates? Have you ever found probate records from your ancestor that list actual human lives as property? Have you ever found a birth certificate that doesn't list a father, even though that cousin had one growing up and everyone just always acted like he was the biodad? Have you ever wondered what this or that person might've done with their life if they hadn't had to have a Life Changing Experience before they were old enough to understand the impact it would have on everyone and everything? Have you ever found a death certificate that lists suicide as the cause and then found yourself reading the fourth article in a row about the distant cousin who shot themselves in a Walmart parking lot? How about one for a teenage cousin who died from dropping his gun in the woods? Ever look up the history of empty houses around you?
The Troubling Things kept piling up. At some point, I realized that I didn't really know my family at all. I'm not talking Mom and Dad, etc; I'm talking about The Holler. My possum people. I grew up in poverty, as did they, but our far-back ancestors owned hundreds of acres of land, multiple houses, humans as commodity. I can't say I'm sad to have not had a taste of that pie, but I also hate that the lack of money shaped the last 4 or 5 of our generations. I was raised being told that suicide was the ultimate, most unforgiveable sin, and was only committed by weak people. But after finding so many of them spread through the branches of my tree, I can start to understand the anger, sorrow, and heartbreak that led to that mentality. I don't condone it, and I feel like if mental health had been taken more seriously by society in genral and my family in particular, a lot of those stories wouldnt have ended so tragically.
I encountered plenty of unpleasant people on Wikitree, sure, though for the most part their frustration was honestly my fault (though that one guy was just rude). What really kinda slowed me down, though, was how draining it became. I was constantly thinking about people who died before I was born, about relatives I'd never met and who were related to at least a hundred more people I don't know. I was pondering backstories, whether I wanted to or not. I was feeling at lot more sadness at the prospect of discovery, as opposed to the excitement with which I once approached it. On top of that, life situations that led to more constraints on my free time left me wanting to do things that would better help drown out the garbage fire that is reality these days, and brother, researching the Civil War during times like these can be kinda depressing (especially if your kin supported the South). Genealogy hasn't entirely been moved to the back burner, because I'm still fascinated by it and there are still some mysteries I want to solve, but I'm being more cautious about which paths I go down. Since I'm not doing it as often anymore, I'm trying to make it matter when I do, you know?
Huh. It suddenly occurs to me that by relearning html and getting back into old internet webstuff, I'm picking up yet another habit. Maybe. Does it count if it's an old habit you're dusting off and trying out again?
At least it won't be another box of beads/fat quarters/origami paper/coloring books and various implements of color/jewelry findings/tools/etc.
Rediscovering zines, however, is proving to be much more of a clutter-threat...
I knew, in theory, that Dad's family came from New York. You could cut Auntie and Grandma Dang's Brooklyn accent with a knife. That should've been my first clue that there might be roots in my tree that reached beyond western North Carolina, but my brain chalked that up to "well, Mama did fall in love with a Yankee." Besides, even had I been interested enough to think beyond the immediate demands of teenage life, by the time I was old enough to consider Dad's side of my equation, he'd already been living in the holler for over a decade. He was practically a possum. Auntie and Grandma Dang had been in the area longer. Possums all. I did meet my aunt and cousins Dang once, when they came down for Grandma's funeral, but they were (and still are) living in the general burbs-and-surrounding-NYC area, so there weren't too many bonding opportunities.
So here we are, Adult Aw Dang (married name redacted), living in the suburbs of A City doing my Adult Life things like job and mortgage and work-life balance, and I think, you know, I don't have enough hobbies. I need more. I need one more thing to obsess over for a few months and then forget, but maybe this time, I can make it something that doesn't leave behind piles of unused supplies. That'd be good. Fortunately for me, COVID shut down everything including my job, so I suddenly found myself with tons of free time to find a new hobby (silver linings, people)! Shortly before my place of employment closed for the covid, a coworker who was super into genealogy was showing me how to use our library's access to Ancestry.com If you have any interest at all in genealogy, I would recommend seeing if your local library also has access to the Library version; it's basic, but I was able to trace back several generations, and you'd think that would be cool? And it mostly was? At first?
The thing about Ancestry is, people don't really need to provide proof for relationship claims. At first, I was falling all over myself linking up people in my tree with all these other ancestral profiles on other people's trees, and I was finding out all of this really wild stuff about my ancestors like: did you know that PapAw actually came from the coast of NC? I mean, of course you didn't. NEITHER DID I! His family has evidently been in VA/NC/SC coastal area since the late 1600s/early 1700s. MamAw's family has been in that area of western NC for around 200 years, and were among the first settlers in the region. That blew my mind. My history spans the entire state. And then I started tracing the Dang family line...and they've apparently been knocking around the NY/NJ area since around the same time! There are apparently historical landmarks in some towns in these states that bear the names of my forebears. Holy moly. SO! You can imagine my near disbelief when I traced my dad's line all the way back to...The Schuyler Family. Yes, that Schuyler Family (werk). I couldn't believe it. What?! But this family tree right here shows a clear line between my dad and Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy. I texted the coworker who'd been coaching me, gushing about my ties to Honest to God American Royalty. She was patient, and more importantly, she didn't make me feel like an idiot when she explained that very old historical records (like from the late 18th century) were handwritten and can often be difficult to read correctly. She encouraged me to look up the actual documents and see what they said. Long story short, I am actually descended from a family known as Schuh who did live in the same general area as the Schuylers. Did any of the family trees I was looking at on Ancestry have that link to the Schuhs, as opposed to the undoubtedly more famous Schuylers?
Nah.
This is not where the story ends, though; this is just the beginning. You see, I found another site that's much more rigorous about evidence. Wikitree is used by actual legitime do-this-for-money-and-leasure genealogists. I was even lucky enough to find a whole ass group devoted to Appalachian genealogy; when I joined their Discord server, I was immediately greeted by a dozen people saying hi and telling me the varying degrees to which we were related. Love those guys. Anyway! This was where I really got down to work, cleaning up everything I'd moved over from Ancestry, making corrections as needed, and researching even further back. I learned so much from so many lovely people who were patient (I'm using that word a lot, aren't I) and very, very enthusiastic about building onto The Tree (not like cult enthusiastic, god no. the good kind). I started filling out my own tree, adding in siblings to great-great-grandparents, filling out families of married-in aunts and uncles (no one still living, mind you. that's very frowned upon and rightfully so. privacy is too precious a commodity these days). I was learning and doing and researching and thinking, and then out of nowhere I found the First Troubling Thing.
See, the problem about finding a Troubling Thing is that you don't want to know more, but you also really want to poke at it. And the problem with poking a Troubling Thing is that there are always more and you will find them and if you poke them all you begin to Know Too Much and the thing about Knowing Too Much is that there's a measure of Ignorance that brings the joy in some hobbies. Do you know how many death certificates you look at in this hobby? Do you know how many questions you never had that start to have cloudy answers when you look at too many death certificates? Have you ever found probate records from your ancestor that list actual human lives as property? Have you ever found a birth certificate that doesn't list a father, even though that cousin had one growing up and everyone just always acted like he was the biodad? Have you ever wondered what this or that person might've done with their life if they hadn't had to have a Life Changing Experience before they were old enough to understand the impact it would have on everyone and everything? Have you ever found a death certificate that lists suicide as the cause and then found yourself reading the fourth article in a row about the distant cousin who shot themselves in a Walmart parking lot? How about one for a teenage cousin who died from dropping his gun in the woods? Ever look up the history of empty houses around you?
The Troubling Things kept piling up. At some point, I realized that I didn't really know my family at all. I'm not talking Mom and Dad, etc; I'm talking about The Holler. My possum people. I grew up in poverty, as did they, but our far-back ancestors owned hundreds of acres of land, multiple houses, humans as commodity. I can't say I'm sad to have not had a taste of that pie, but I also hate that the lack of money shaped the last 4 or 5 of our generations. I was raised being told that suicide was the ultimate, most unforgiveable sin, and was only committed by weak people. But after finding so many of them spread through the branches of my tree, I can start to understand the anger, sorrow, and heartbreak that led to that mentality. I don't condone it, and I feel like if mental health had been taken more seriously by society in genral and my family in particular, a lot of those stories wouldnt have ended so tragically.
I encountered plenty of unpleasant people on Wikitree, sure, though for the most part their frustration was honestly my fault (though that one guy was just rude). What really kinda slowed me down, though, was how draining it became. I was constantly thinking about people who died before I was born, about relatives I'd never met and who were related to at least a hundred more people I don't know. I was pondering backstories, whether I wanted to or not. I was feeling at lot more sadness at the prospect of discovery, as opposed to the excitement with which I once approached it. On top of that, life situations that led to more constraints on my free time left me wanting to do things that would better help drown out the garbage fire that is reality these days, and brother, researching the Civil War during times like these can be kinda depressing (especially if your kin supported the South). Genealogy hasn't entirely been moved to the back burner, because I'm still fascinated by it and there are still some mysteries I want to solve, but I'm being more cautious about which paths I go down. Since I'm not doing it as often anymore, I'm trying to make it matter when I do, you know?
Huh. It suddenly occurs to me that by relearning html and getting back into old internet webstuff, I'm picking up yet another habit. Maybe. Does it count if it's an old habit you're dusting off and trying out again?
At least it won't be another box of beads/fat quarters/origami paper/coloring books and various implements of color/jewelry findings/tools/etc.
Rediscovering zines, however, is proving to be much more of a clutter-threat...