Genealogy: My mother's journey to the dark places of American History

By Brian Schwarz

Researching our family tree was the number one objective of my mother’s retirement. She would fly once or twice a year to Utah on a genealogy vacation where she researched at the Family History Library with a personal librarian. In the beginning she seemed most interested in discovering specifics of her Scottish heritage. She was like a kid in a candy store with each new discovery as she started learning to really dig in to the past. Loaded with new bits of information and random details, she had big plans to visit the ancestral homeland and tie all the ends together in person. She was keen on discovering family churches, specific towns, and possibly finding a castle or two to explore when she arrived in Scotland.

She found everything she was looking for and her discoveries aligned with much of what already had been passed down to her via oral tradition. After her first trip to Scotland – there would be others – she was drawn more deeply into our family’s inception in the Americas. She set out to discover exactly when her long-passed family members made the leap across the pond. Even more, she wanted to locate the towns where they landed when they got here. In short order, she was hunting for their graves.

My mother became a driven and passionate genealogist. in time she would discover a lot more than anyone ever expected. I wondered why she became so obsessed with the hunt for these figures from the past. I assumed she was racing against time. She was a breast and lung cancer survivor and was quite aware of her dwindling time under the sun. Perhaps she wanted to leave something permanent and lasting to the coming generations? “No”, she told me. “I’m doing it for me”.

My mother would often say she was intent on living life on her terms

She would never reveal to me why she was so compelled to research stories of the family's past. She was not one to explain herself to anyone. She lived and died by her own choices and dearly protected her motives. When her research uncovered the truth about our family’s possible involvement in the Middle Passage slave trade and the building of The South on the backs of imported Africans, she seemed unphased. She was in no way a bigot, but she became intent on proving she was a descendent of Confederate soldiers in order to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I asked again. “Why are you so obsessed with discovering such tangled roots? ”

She would give up nothing to clarify. My mother was notorious for answering any question I would ask with “because”. In her defense, I always had two follow-up questions for every question I asked. Finding out why she was so fixated on her quest, then, would require a bit of my own research. I started listening and observing more intently what she was doing. Turns out she just wanted to see how far back she could go because she simply wanted to know. There was no deep analysis of the politics or crimes against humanity that served as backdrop to her discoveries. For her, it was research for the sake of research.

For me, however, the expedition she was on filled me with an impending dread for what might be unearthed as she trod on graves in search of the past. As a student of political science and budding journalist focused on the Post-Colonial Americas, I was unable to separate her findings from research I was doing into the underbelly of American history. My focus was on the human consequences of European Colonization and comparing the policies that took hold, which led to the rise of the Confederacy in the South and of the Industrial Revolution in the North. I could not separate my own family’s participation in weaving the delicate but oppressive fabric that formed and continues to form of the United States of America.  

NOTE: This is Part 1 of a planned series. Please leave me a content if you are interested in reading more.