Fitz's Opinion: How I came to discover a family tree thought lost to the ages

The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

It was early May when I got a surprising email regarding the matter of my lineage. Usually this genre of letter is from an angry reader. Like the reader who questioned my pedigree. ”Was your family tree a shrub?” Or the reader who questioned my birth. “Did your parents have any children who lived?” My favorite question from such readers? “Who do you think you are?”

Who do I think I am?

I have no clue.

Dad was an orphan. Mom fled her abusive family during the Depression. Estranged from their bloodlines, their family was a quilt of friends. I filled in the blanks, imagining my ancestors to be the peasants you saw in Hollywood epics that met their fates in chains, dungeons and coliseums. Just another extra among a cast of thousands, a nameless nobody left off the credits, forgotten by history.

And then this extraordinary email arrived. The writer thanked me for my columns and cartoons and then surprised me with an offer: “I would be delighted to research your ancestry. For free, of course, as a thank-you gift to you.”

How could I say, “No”? I told my kind genealogist what I knew. Undaunted, he began digging.

My kind genealogist found names. And links and graves and enlistment notices and military records and census data. Every day I’d open my email wondering who I was going to meet next.

My kind genealogist returned a procession of heretofore unknown great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, abducted by death, back into the world.

I won’t bore you with names, dates or pictures. We all have a similar rogue’s gallery. And please don’t reach for your faded pictures, either. I don’t care what your great-great-grand father looked like unless he was the Elephant Man. It’s exhausting poring over the old sepia portraits of another’s clan and pretending to be very, very, very interested. What can you say? “Look at that! You have your great-great-grandfather’s sepia-colored eyes.” Or “She certainly is beautiful, by 18th century standards.” Or “Which great uncle did the old battle ax poison?”

My kind genealogist emailed me a pedigree chart, confirming I was that most aristocratic of all American breeds, a mixed-breed mutt, a glorious mongrel.

I never cared for purebreds. Nothing but trouble and dim as they come.

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How can I thank my kind genealogist?

Ellen said, “It would be impossible to thank him.” She’s right. How do you thank a benevolent detective who finds stories of your kin from the decks of sailing ships and the backs of conestogas?

“One of your ancestors was in the Civil War.”

“Which side?!” In 2021 this matters.

“Union. Here’s his picture.” I looked into the former private’s eyes and promised to continue his fight to preserve our Union.

I was struck by how simultaneously meaningful, and meaningless, it all was. I wondered about their lives, studying their stern, stoic faces for clues and found their familiar eyes revealed little save for the harsh nature of their lives as immigrants, soldiers, farmers, journalists, laborers, civil servants and pioneers.

What will our great-great-grandchildren wonder when they see images of us?

I doubt they’ll be able to divine from looking at a picture of me and my older brother Bob together, that he patiently taught me to walk when I was a toddler, to love poetry when I was a teenager, to honor service to our nation when he was in Vietnam and to laugh at the absurdities of growing old together.

Studying them one can become prideful, reveling in the history of their extraordinary persistence, grit and resilience, it’s easy to flatter yourself and believe you are the inheritor of your ancestor’s more heroic traits.

When Bob, my last surviving sibling, left the world mere weeks ago, I assumed the rank of patriarch and felt the honorable burden of being the sole caretaker of my family’s stories. I felt the loneliness of a generation drifting inexorably into history where we all will slumber until we are discovered by kind genealogists in the future who will tell our stories.

Next time I’m asked, “Who do you think you are?” I will argue I am more than family histories over which I have no control. I am the sum of the people I love. As surely as I am the sum of my immigrant and pioneer ancestors I am the sum of a laughing brother on his knees holding out his arms encouraging me to take my first step.