Digging up family tree roots can unearth tough questions
Should we explore or ignore unflattering information learned about our family history? Should we share it? Bury it? Make reparations for it?
These questions were asked by readers after I shared the story of
Dr. Marvin Zelkowitz, of Chesterton, who as a child wasn’t told any details from his parents about his family history.
“I received no answers,” said Zelkowitz, 75, whose parents arrived in the United States through Ellis Island. “I asked my father about our family history. He told me he was not interested in his roots. My mother said nothing.”
Shannon Brown, 68, of Naperville, asked questions I never considered and which likely have no correct answers.
“Multiple ancestors fought for independence. More probably took Native American land. Three greatgrandfathers fought for the Confederacy. At least one branch owned slaves they freed before the Civil War. So what do I do with this information?” Brown asked.
“I know that if Congress ever starts seriously discussing reparations, I cannot oppose reparations for descendants of slaves or Native Americans,” Brown reasoned. “Should I do more? Should I revise my estate plans and redirect charitable giving to help descendants of slaves and Native Americans, instead of my alma maters and professional society?
“Should I direct that the alma maters and professional society use a percentage of what they receive for programs that help descendants of slaves or Native Americans? In the case of one alma mater, doing so would reduce support for an underrepresented minority – women going into engineering,” Brown said.
Brown’s father died in 1962 (at 58), and her mother died in 1976 (at 63). The information Brown learned about her mother’s side of the family included names, dates and places of birth, marriages and deaths dating back to arrival in the U.S. colonies in the 1740s from Scotland.
“With a canteen that an ancestor had carried while fighting in
Cromwell’s army,” Brown explained.
When Brown cleaned out her mother’s home, she found a box that included her father’s scrapbook from the 1920s through 1940s, plus notes he had collected on their family history. Since then, Brown has mined more information from a state’s archives as well as from relatives on both sides of her family.
The more details she unearthed, the more she began asking herself what to do with such genealogical specifics about her ancestors. Other readers asked similar questions about their rather distasteful history.
“My ancestors on my father’s side were blatant racists and publicly vicious people, according to family letters I found in my parents’ basement after their deaths. My discovery forced me to reconsider everything I was once told about them,” said William L., of Merrillville. “It also caused me to push pause on wanting to find more details.”
Allan Zirlin, of Morton Grove, wrote me to say his mother, her mother, and his aunt came from Bialystok, Poland, to Ellis Island in 1923. “My grandfather came here 10 years earlier to avoid conscription in WWI. Yeah, a draft dodger,” he joked.
Millie Lencioni, of Highland, whose parents were immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, reminded me that many people from that generation had to endure hardships they’d rather not share with their children.
“Mainly to protect their children, not necessarily to keep the information from them,” she wrote. “If something is very painful, it’s easier to try to block it out rather than to talk about it. Kids are usually not very curious about those things, and don’t think to ask until they have their own children.”
This generational fact of life was cited by most readers who contacted me. The further we get into our future, the more we care about our past. But is it too late? Or is this what some parents wanted anyway?
“There are so many reasons why parents didn’t share their history,” said Linda Swisher, public information coordinator for the Hammond Public Library.
“There are those parents who faced a challenging situation and wanted to put it behind them. Or they just weren’t interested in passing along the stories, or thought their family wasn’t interested,” Swisher said. “Sometimes, to be sure, there are family secrets.”
And sometimes the immigrant ancestor was trying to assimilate in a new land, deeply wanting their kids to “be American,” she said. “There are tons of stories, some of which we’ll never know.”
The upside is that there are more online tools than ever for researching family histories, such as your local genealogical society or the history room at your library.
“It may offer free classes so you can learn the basics,” Swisher said.
Ancestry Library Edition is usually available only at a library, though it must be used in-house. Due to COVID-19, it’s possibly being made available to library cardholders for remote use through December.
Martin Fischer, an official with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, reached out to share his organization’s website, jgsi.org, for anyone interested in researching their family history. Zelkowitz, who’s Jewish, grew up bilingual, speaking both Yiddish and English, noticed familiar family names while visiting the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
In my previous column,
Zelkowitz implored parents to tell their children about the family tree.
Digging up some roots, however, can lead us into deeper holes than we expected.