"Whatever happened to hello? How are you? My name is? These are all the people and ancestral lands that I am descended from?"
"What happened to that?"
When I had originally planned for the “Pre-AC: All of this predated my existence, which honestly feels a lil’ rude”book/serial of True Story, I had this idea that I’d start at the top with a few bite-sized anecdotes about the cool and funny stuff I learned about my heritage back when I was in the final round of this Swedish reality TV show that was all about connecting with your Swedish heritage (we’ll talk allll about that experience later).
Then I would ladder down from my great-grandparents down to my parents with some great photos and touching stories - y’know, stuff about who they were as actual people instead of just their roles in relation to me - and then be all “and then I was born!” and we would move swiftly onto the next chapter of this project.
Fast, neat, easy.
I wanted to do it this way mostly because people love hearing about your genealogy almost as much as they like hearing about your dreams. Unless they really love you and therefore are willing to sit through any story of yours - or if you’re a particularly famous or beautiful person that they’re already fascinated by - most people simply do not give a single shit.
And to be honest, I didn’t really care all that much about where I came from, either! What I knew for sure about my genealogical makeup when I started this project was that I had a ton of German and British ancestry, a lot of Norwegian and French, some Scottish, Dutch, and Anishinaabe, and a little bit of Danish, Irish, Swedish. And while some of that was fun to think about, I rarely felt connected to those roots. I barely felt connected to my own immediate family…the Enneagram 4 feeling of “there has to be some kind of mix-up here, you guys cannot be my real parents” alienation and disconnection was something I’ve felt my entire life. I believed I was supposed to be a princess living in a castle somewhere in the southern English countryside, not living in a ranch-style house in Bay City, Wisconsin with you jerks! And then you want me to sing a song about a bunch of poor German and British farmers who came all the way to America just to settle in boring Red River Valley, Minnesota?! Um, no thank you!!! I’m sure they were all very lovely people but that kind of depressing, hard-scrabble life is not something that I feel like learning more about, thank you so much!!
On the flip side, I also have a lot of attitude about people who hang their hat on their ancestors’ stories or accomplishments. You know the type - it’s always someone who loves to brag about what their great-grandfather did or how they’re related to some famous or royal so-and-so, as if that makes up for them being a present-day loser in the here and now.
But as I worked to gather more of the facts of my grandparents and their parents and then their parents, I started to get more into it, especially because of all the great stuff I was finding. My most recent ancestors all came from + had big families, and so now (along with my mom and aunt and their first cousins and their ancestry research), there’s all these distant cousins who have compiled a ton of archival records and materials about our common ancestral roots. Old photos, newspaper clippings, even entire books have been collated together to help tell the history of where (and who) we came from.
One book in particular detailed two exciting historical lines, which really got the ball rolling. Then from that research, I discovered another historical line that was even more fascinating, and boom - before I knew it, I was suddenly spending all of my free time researching the (literally) ancient history of my family, and then verifying those bloodlines by learning how to read raw DNA matches on GedMatch.
(I also want to pause here and take a moment to recognize that my ability to verify so much ancestry research comes from an unbelievable amount of unearned privilege. Not only am I incredibly fortunate that so much of my heritage is white European and therefore so much more easily traceable through traditional routes and historical means, I am also lucky to have stumbled upon ancestors whose bloodlines have been exhaustively researched and tracked and recorded by many others for reasons we’ll talk about in another post. I also want acknowledge that there are many of you out there reading this who are at the mercy of generic and vague tools when it comes to finding out who your people were and where they came from, and that is fucking bullshit, because no one should have to yearn for that ancestral connection only to be met with the pain of those obstacles. My family is also really lucky when it comes to already knowing where our Indigenous ancestors hailed from + what tribal bands they belonged to, because a lot of the traditional means of genealogy research don’t tell you shit about your indigenous roots, apart from the fact that you may have indigenous ancestry (and they might not even tell you if you have Indigenous heritage at all if those ancestors are farther back than 5-6 generations). I’m grateful that orgs like GedMatch are seeking to fill those gaps, but the learning curve and time+energy cost of entry are still much higher for the regular layperson than they should be.)
At some point, I realized that if I wanted to (dear reader, I don’t), I could literally spend the rest of my life researching and compiling knowledge about my family’s genealogy and ancestral heritage, because the farther back you go, the more ancestors you have.
So while I kind of had this whole idea that this chapter would somehow be a complete and in-depth history of my genealogical roots, I’m simply going to have to be content with sharing what I know so far. I’m also going to have to make peace with the fact that every single time I’ve told myself that, I’ve dipped back to the ancestry research and almost immediately uncovered something else incredible.
Which…in a weird way, I don’t know…there’s something sort of beautiful about the fact that the largest amount of possibility for this project - which, FTR, was originally meant to only focus on the forward motion of my life, neatly wrapping up all the chapters of it with a big red Happy Honda Days bow - is how far we could also stretch it back through the ages.
And…I don’t know…maybe this is a little too touchy-feely, but I keep thinking about how this one time, I was talking to a friend who is also a psychic about this project and she told me to stay really flexible per what I think it should be and look like, because it’s going to become something so unexpectedly beautiful and healing in ways I could never predict. That definitely came true with this particular chapter of True Story. There’s just something so beautiful about being able to share and tell the stories of both my most recent and ancient ancestors on all these different platforms and get to honor their lives in this way.
And then I think of how lovely and moving it was a few years ago when I talked about my paternal grandmother on my Facebook page and how I didn’t really know anything about her because she died before I was born. That led to this really amazing moment of all my aunts and cousins telling me all this great stuff about her and witness them sharing and laughing about their memories of her with each other, too. I will never forget that experience, and how one Facebook post made me feel so much closer to that part of my family and the grandmother I never got to know. I hope that, by sharing all of this great stuff I’ve learned about my ancestors, it can be really fun and edifying and maybe even healing for other family members, too. And maybe for you, too? The thing about ancestral research is that people rarely want to hear about yours, but once you start talking about any cool stuff you’ve found, suddenly everyone you know has signed up on ancestry dot com and has started doing their own genealogical digging.
And that’s sort of the bigger picture of this whole project…like yes, I am very excited to just talk about myself the whole time, but I also know that these things can serve as really fun catalysts for others to think about their own experiences and soak in the nostalgia of the past and share in those memories with others.
Anyway…the original point is, I have a feeling that I’ll be continuing to update the Pre-AC book substantially at different points in my life (like sometimes I’m like “no more research for the rest of my life” and then other times I’m like, “I wonder how I can paid to do this, but for only myself…?”), but for now…we just gotta get this started, yeah?
Like Teen Mom Jenelle’s boooyyyfrand Kief’ah once mused, “Well the past is history and the future is a mystery and now is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.”