Uncovering family history
Pandemic has given people the chance to connect with past
Every Wednesday night at 8:15, 16 of my wife’s family members gather around computer screens in their homes in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to look into their collective past.
On a Zoom screen, we watch grainy Super 8 images of my mother-inlaw, who died long before I met her daughter, as a young girl, a sassy teenager, a new mother dipping my wife’s tiny baby toes in the lake at Mohonk Mountain House in New York in the early 1980s. We see my wife’s cousins, now middleaged, as girls running through the sprinkler and mugging for the lens on the lawn of their childhood home in West Philly, the cars of the mid-’70s lining the street behind them. We see their grandparents in middle age, watching their teenage daughters splash in the ocean off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1960s.
We listen to audiotapes of my wife’s aunt as a newlywed in Indiana, recounting the mundane details of a cross-country move for her own mother, as mailing a reel-to-reel came at significantly less cost than a regular long-distance call back then.
Several years ago, my wife’s cousin, Julie Rottenberg, a screenwriter, and her husband, Ben Rubin, an artist, were unloading an old family storage unit outside Philadelphia when they uncovered four boxes brimming with Super 8 reels, audiotapes and thousands upon thousands of slides. They moved the boxes to their storage unit in their building in Brooklyn, New York, promising to go through them soon. But as relics often do, the boxes again sat unattended for years.
It wasn’t until last year, as Rottenberg and Rubin, parents of two preteenagers, were cleaning out their storage unit that they revisited the boxes.
Rubin sent their contents away to be digitized. Conveniently, the images returned right before lockdown. Now every week he searches for material, from five to 30 minutes, to broadcast to the extended family every Wednesday.
“This is the most time I’ve spent with my family in years,” my wife said recently, teary-eyed after a particularly emotional viewing.
And we’re not alone — even though many of us are, now, technically, alone. People everywhere are looking for new ways to connect with their families beyond just waving hello on videoconference. Some are turning into amateur archivists, sifting through records they never would have had the time to examine otherwise.
Zooming to Cambodia
Samneang Chheng, 39, is Cambodian American but lives in London and works as a commerce sales partner lead at Google. Every week, she and her fiance, John Burtt, join Chheng’s mother, Chuon Chin, on a Zoom call during which Chin teaches a traditional Cambodian recipe.
From her home in Fort Worth, Texas, where Chheng was raised after her family escaped a Taiwanese refugee camp shortly after her birth, Chin explains the ingredients and methods behind the dishes Chheng grew up eating, along with stories of her youth in Cambodia.
“I was never interested in learning these recipes,” Chheng said. But the combination of her mother’s advanced age and the current difficulty of international travel led Chheng and Burtt to start scheduling regular Zoom calls, each covering a different recipe.
Chheng and Burtt are hoping to turn these recipes into a cookbook that their children may someday read. “It’s meant to preserve our history,” she said. “But it’s meant to preserve her story too.”
Asurprising discovery
In Los Angeles, Johnny North, 44, who owns a production company, recently confirmed a suspicion that he has held since he was a teenager: that he was adopted.
Drawn to film, art and music, North always felt different from his more conventional family, growing up in Long Island, New York. “I wasn’t unloved or uncared for,” he said. “I was just different.”
He was in high school when he noticed a picture of his mother dated shortly before his birth — glaringly not pregnant. He had also long wondered why he, their first child, was born 15 years after their marriage. “But there were just things we never talked about,” North said.
A year and a half ago, his wife gave him a DNA test kit, and the results were perplexing. North took another test in December 2019, administered by a different company, that revealed even more discrepancies.
Shortly afterward, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that made it easier for adoptees to obtain their birth certificates. North’s arrived in mid-March. It revealed that he had been born Jason Patrick Bouchard to a 16-year-old single mother who lived not far from where his parents raised him.
North’s emotions have since been running that gamut that could be expected with such a revelation. Restless days and sleepless nights were alleviated after he talked to his parents. It was a confrontation made easier by the fact that North is locked down at home in Los Angeles.
“It might have been harder if I actually had to go and sit face-to-face with my parents, to look them in the eye,” North said. “And the minute I did, I felt a thousand pounds lighter.”
Connecting the synapses
One of the first things we were robbed of at the onset of the pandemic was human connection. Suddenly, and without warning, we became universal shut-ins, solitary citizens of our own little islands, stuck indefinitely with whoever was in our immediate orbits: spouses, children, roommates, pets.
But as social creatures, no sooner were we told to stay at home did we figure out how to reach out, how to virtually be with one another, how to raise a glass together (or, in the case of my wife’s family, to bond over the shared memories of the past as they skittered by on a grainy Super 8 reel).
We were forced to take to Zoom, FaceTime and the examination of old letters sent across the ocean nearly 100 years ago in an effort to replicate those little interpersonal synapses that make us human, to make us feel normal in a time that is anything but. And in that process, at least a few of us have tapped into something that dwarfs the monolith of a world-halting pandemic. That is, our own personal histories.
Because as we sit virtually beside our family, watching my wife’s longdead mother as a young woman dancing in the surf off Cape Cod, long before marriage and children, multiple sclerosis and brain cancer, it’s clear that while mandated space may exist between us, we’re holding it together.