![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2CT5t7I
Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you did!!! And that is, verbatim, my mother’s advice that she always gives people who ask her about how to get started in geneaology. Find your oldest surviving relative, and ask them who the oldest relative they remember was.
There’s just so much stuff you can find out. For POC, there’s often so much that the Institutions of White Supremacy have taken, and it’s precious to get any scraps you can. I don’t know as much about that as I might.
But for white people, which I know more about, I feel like it’s really crucial to make these connections and remember that each of us has a heritage that isn’t just this blank-slate nothingness that White America kind of forces a default to. We all came from immigrants, and each successive generation of them was kind of aggressively smoothed away into compliance. It’s really important to try to find out who your people used to be, and what they used to be, and what they used to believe. This myth of a monocultural America is a myth, but modern culture has made it a much more convincing myth than it used to be.
I was talking to Dude about this too– his grandparents’ paperwork contains a bunch of dry factual details, and he has no way of connecting those to any kind of meaning– his grandmother and grandfather were from different parts of the country, and while they had a mother-tongue in common, their second languages were different. Their oldest child, his aunt, might have a chance of remembering why that was– not only does she remember emigrating, she also was the Dutiful Daughter who kept up the social obligations and visited all the elders of the community as they dwindled into old age, while Dude’s mother, the baby sister, was less involved, and wasn’t born until they got here.
Never underestimate just how much the oldest person in your family might know!
(Your picture was not posted)
Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you did!!! And that is, verbatim, my mother’s advice that she always gives people who ask her about how to get started in geneaology. Find your oldest surviving relative, and ask them who the oldest relative they remember was.
There’s just so much stuff you can find out. For POC, there’s often so much that the Institutions of White Supremacy have taken, and it’s precious to get any scraps you can. I don’t know as much about that as I might.
But for white people, which I know more about, I feel like it’s really crucial to make these connections and remember that each of us has a heritage that isn’t just this blank-slate nothingness that White America kind of forces a default to. We all came from immigrants, and each successive generation of them was kind of aggressively smoothed away into compliance. It’s really important to try to find out who your people used to be, and what they used to be, and what they used to believe. This myth of a monocultural America is a myth, but modern culture has made it a much more convincing myth than it used to be.
I was talking to Dude about this too– his grandparents’ paperwork contains a bunch of dry factual details, and he has no way of connecting those to any kind of meaning– his grandmother and grandfather were from different parts of the country, and while they had a mother-tongue in common, their second languages were different. Their oldest child, his aunt, might have a chance of remembering why that was– not only does she remember emigrating, she also was the Dutiful Daughter who kept up the social obligations and visited all the elders of the community as they dwindled into old age, while Dude’s mother, the baby sister, was less involved, and wasn’t born until they got here.
Never underestimate just how much the oldest person in your family might know!
(Your picture was not posted)
