According to articles in Time and USA Today, genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the United States. In fact, family history has become a big industry with online sites, such as Ancestry, making up the second most popular category of websites on the internet. Popular television series tell stories of tracing the roots of celebrities and others. And the number of people pursuing family history is growing year by year. Why?
Once, when celebrating a landmark birthday, my wife, Seija, and I stayed in a hotel at the foot of the Acropolis. It was a spot where at least 100 generations of people had lived, slept, worked, loved, fought, worshipped, and died. One evening with that thought in mind, we looked out across the roof terrace at the floodlit Parthenon radiating brightly against the dark behind it. On such a warm summer night as that, it was impossible not to feel immersed by the past. We understood ourselves as human beings, part of a long chain of people like ourselves. In that world, roots mattered, as did my grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ worlds and their journeys.
The past matters to us, for our present well-being and sense of identity and belonging are conditioned by what happened before. Among the things many people dread most is the failure of memory, through senility and disease, for example. We rightly fear the loss of our connection to the, and refuse to forget, if we can.
There obviously is a thirst for the things discovering one’s family past does for you. As noted author and historian Nathanael Philbrick puts it, “Genealogy is the backbone of human memory – scaffolding upon which we can construct a sense of how we came to being. At its heart, genealogy springs from what is one of the most fundamental of human impulses . . . a refusal to forget.” Rock star Bono lays it out simply, “There is a moment when it is dysfunctional not to look at the past.”
Learning of our ancestors inevitably bolsters our sense of identity, belonging, and society. Today’s lifestyle unfortunately does not always encourage communities as much as in the past. People too seldom live in close contact with extended families. Pursuing studies and jobs, we move away from our roots. Churches and their congregations no longer play as much a part of many people’s everyday lives as they did in the past. We rarely do our shopping at small shops where we meet friends and know the shopkeeper. Often, we hardly know our next-door neighbors. If we lose a strong sense of identity, or wonder where we fit in, it is easy to feel anchorless.
Recent research suggests that an important and simple thing we can do to support success in the home is to develop a family narrative. A family narrative – the encapsulation of the “thousand stories behind us” – transfers memories, gives us an identity, and links us to those around us as well as those from the past. In short, our family narrative encourages bonds that replace those lost with the weakening of traditional neighborhoods
An Emory University study shows that children who know more about their families perform better in the face of challenge. Children with a narrative had a “sense of being part of a larger family.” They knew they belonged to something bigger than themselves. Even negative stories foster emotional resilience, sometimes even more than positive ones. As one therapist put it, “We all feel stronger if we are part of a tapestry. One thread alone is weak, but, woven into something larger, surrounded by other threads, it is more difficult to unravel.” Even more, as a writer in Psychology Today put it, our family stories provide “…context to our suffering, and the strength to persevere.”
