How about a National Ancestors’ Day?

LET me start with a few questions. Do you know the origin of your surname? Do you know the original roots of your paternal clan? How about the one on your mother’s side?

Do you know the name of the father of the father of your father? Who was the mother of your mother’s grandmother?

Can you trace your family line to ancestors who lived 100 years or 200 years ago?

If you can’t answer any of the questions with a yes, you’re like the rest of us. I, too, know so little of the history of my own family. The irony of it all is history was my favorite subject in school.

This was the problem I faced when I tried to give my Fil-am nephews and their wives and children in the U.S. some info tidbits about our family surname. My elder brother has been living in Georgia for so many years now, long enough to establish a branch of our family there in the deep American South. I am very sure “Tayag” is a strange, outlandish name in a place where residents are named Smith, Jones, Johnson, Carson, Harrison and so on.

Good thing, I managed to recall some information that a town historian told me a few years back. I also tried researching the Internet. I was able to cobble up a paragraph and sent it to them for which they were thankful.

Just a sidebar, this is the initial phase of my step-by-step plan to get them to know more about Filipino culture, of which they are clueless. My brother clearly did a poor job in educating his offsprings about his Filipino family and his mother country.

When I shared the post with our family relatives here in the Philippines, it turned out they too were delighted to learn about what I managed to dig up about our family surname. Now that I’ve kindled their interest, they want more.

I wish I could dig up some more. If only our culture had native “griots” to keep years of history alive for our present generation and for us to pass on to the next.

“Griots” are designated oral historians found in the villages of West Africa.

They can recite from memory all the births, deaths, marriages through the generations of the families who live in the villages. Their brains are like memory bank of genealogies, historical narratives, and oral traditions of their people going back centuries.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have storytellers, keepers of genealogies in our clans? I would have liked a “griot” to recall March 1521 the day Magellan landed in one of our islands. Where was my distant forebear then? What was he doing? How I would have loved listening to a native village historian tell their stories even if it would take many days and nights.

The Chinese have the tradition of keeping a family book called “jiapu” that includes names and other details of their family lineage, from father to son. The lineage can go back as far as thousands of years. These “jiapu” books are kept as a way to preserve and uphold a family’s identity and honor throughout the ages.

Five years ago, my wife started a group chat on social media for members of her family. It’s been serving as a platform for sharing her family’s history through easy-to-digest anecdotes and old photographs. In turn, her sisters and brothers contribute their own anecdotes from personal memory. Now the second generation descendants of her “angkan” are encountering each other, some for the first time, including distant never-heard-before relatives. More importantly, they are getting to know each other better and appreciate one another more. It’s really a unifying factor.

To my fellow seniors, now is the time to start creating your own family genealogy as part of the duty of being a good ancestor. Gather what you can from anywhere, everywhere. You can do this by interviewing an old family member who has knowledge of your family history and heritage. Preserve those written records, documents and images you have kept in your shelves. Better yet, scan them, digitize them for posterity. They could form part of the family history that descendants will be reading 100 years from now.

As I surf the net I note a growing interest among Filipinos to search for their own family’s history. This is evident by the several online history websites and blogs. Hopefully their interest will be sustained and spur a movement to preserve and make accessible Filipino genealogy resources.

Todd Lucero Sales who has a website called “Philippines Genealogy Guide: How to Trace Your Filipino Roots” laments the fact that Filipino genealogy research has not yet caught up with the rest of the world in terms of record availability. Dismayingly, there is no central database for records in the Philippines. He adds that most old records in the Philippines can be found in the National Archives of the Philippines, which is still in the initial stages of digitizing records and making them available to the public.

Speaking of digitalization, why can’t our National Archives or Commission on History come up with a Timeline of Philippine History, similar to J.B. Priestley’s “Chart of Biography,” which contained the meticulously inscribed names of approximately 2,000 poets, artists, statesmen, and other famous historical figures dating back three millennia, grouped vertically into one of six occupational categories.

Here’s a food for thought for our national leaders. If there is Araw ng Kagitingan, why not have Araw ng Angkan or Araw ng Kanunu-nunuan, which in English would translate to National Ancestors’ Day? It would be a day dedicated to inspiring Filipinos to look into their roots. Hopefully it will inspire each and every Filipino to embrace genealogy as part of our tradition, in the spirit of Rizal’s “paglingon sa nakaraan.”

I am not saying we should go back to the pre-colonial ways of ancestral worship. Designating a National Ancestors’ Day is simply a way to honor and spark greater interest in knowing more about our forebears and family lineage. My suggestion is for members of the brood or clan to hold gatherings on that special day during which any one can freely share whatever info bits have been uncovered about their ancestry. That would give more substance and meaning to clan reunions.

Just as an example, I remember that as a young boy, my father’s cousin, then in her 60s, told me that she was an accomplished theater actress in her youth and that she performed in local plays or zarzuela with Rogelio de la Rosa and even showed me sepia tinted pictures of them together. That’s a gem of a story, which at that time, I took for granted because I didn’t know any better. One friend confided to me that his side of the family descended from a lusty friar in the 1800s. His research on the said family progenitor took him as far as Segovia Spain. We may not brag about our ancestors who were not great but even so, such stories and anecdotes about our progenitors’ deeds could either provide juicy surprises, interesting sidelights or serve as a source of pride and inspiration for today’s progeny. It could even make a book or movie.

My dream is that the day will come when each family would produce its own Ai-powered digital chronographics, that will chart the lineage of the clan, designed in such a way that when one points to a certain period in Philippine history or even world history, he would instantly know which specific family ancestor lived during that time.

Our ancestors gave us our yesterday, today and through us, will shape our tomorrow. Willingly or not, we are now the designated messengers to carry our forebears’ stories into the future.

Matshona Dhliwayo, a philosopher and author from Zimbabwe, says “a bush with strong roots stands better than a tree with weak ones.” Knowing our roots and preserving that knowledge is the best way to cultivate a strong sense of self-regard, belonging and distinction with respect not only to our family lineage but also our national cultural identity as Filipinos.

In the end, each of us is the sum of our ancestors. Their DNA and chromosomes still live in us. Poet Annie Finch says it so gracefully: “I feel the nights stretching away/ thousands long behind the days/till they reach the darkness where/ all of me is ancestor.”