52 Ancestors 2026 week 3: What This Story Means to Me (the Bigger Story)

 A little reflection on why I have enjoyed this genealogical hobby so much:  there are so many, many stories that are still available if you know where to look for them (or just get lucky!).  I've pretty much stuck to the American story because both sides of my family came to North America in the 17th century, and both sides belonged to religious sects that were deeply invested in record-keeping.  Other people married in of course, not all of them as excited about keeping track of where they came from, and finding their stories has been much more challenging (my paternal grandmother's family for instance now seems to all be buried in the middle of someone's cornfield in Missouri).  But all of it adds up to a lot of the history of the United States: good, bad, ugly, noble, funny, tragic.  Pilgrims and indentured servants arrived within a couple of decades of each other.  The Dutch Reform members came a few years later, and a few of those came by way of Brazil.  Who knew about this Brazilian connection?  Later, they moved west, and the story goes that some of the furniture went in a covered wagon.  Whatever the truth, the dresser that my daughter uses now, that came from my maternal grandmother (that little girl whose photograph appears in last week's entry), that dresser has a board in the bottom that says "Springfield Missouri."  Some of the photos I was given came from a photographer in Springfield, a sort of jumping off place for westward journeys, so maybe that covered wagon was real after all.

My own parents were born in or around Olympia, Washington early in the 20th century:  my father in 1915, my mother in 1921.  My father, a colorful character, traveled around the United States as a roustabout with a circus during the great Depression and then, following a stint as a stagehand for a 3rd rate opera company (his description), joined the U.S. Navy, still pre-war.  Meanwhile my mother lost her father in 1936 in a sawmill accident but she finished high school a couple of years later and started nursing school.  She married my dad, who had rejoined the Navy having realized what was coming, in July of 1941.

I guess what I am reaching for here is that even these more or less ordinary people played a role in weaving the tapestry that is the history of the United States.  Without hundreds or thousands of people and families like mine, none of this would have happened (some would say the world would have been better off it hadn't).  But here we are.  We all have a role whether it's on the world stage or just in our little town.  Seeing the roles of my forebears helps me make sense of my own place in this play.