Thoughts on Lineage Societies and Proofs of Descent Since joining this page, I have noticed with both amusement and empathy the chagrin with which people react when they get called out for posting unsupportable theories as though they were incontrovertible fact. On the one hand, I really do understand this reaction. First, discovering one’s lineage is a thrill; while some people truly do not care where their ancestors came from or who they were, I believe that most people, at a minimum, find it interesting. For many others of us, knowing our ancestry in some measure informs how we think about ourselves. As an example, I discovered quite of bit of circumstantial evidence that I have some ancestors who worked for the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. This fits with my values and my image of myself. Then I discovered that I also have ancestors—a lot of them, over many generations—who owned slaves; I tasted bile in my throat at that one. Both the good and the abhorrent are part of what I believe to be my heritage. Disproving either of these lines would make me go through a cognitive readjustment process, but disproving the Underground Railroad ancestry would also be a disappointment of the highest magnitude. I think that people have similar reactions when they discover that a lineage that they believe to be valid, such as that to a Mayflower passenger, isn’t supported. Second, genealogy research is puzzle-solving. I empathize whole-heartedly with people who think they’ve traced a lineage back many generations only to find a broken link, or a link so weak that it cannot be viewed as anything but a supposition. That’s happened to me and it made me want to scream. It feels like working on a crossword puzzle only to find that, because you got the first few answers wrong (but the letters fit the spaces and the words seemed reasonable at the time), the rest of your answers are wrong, too. Third, I believe that some people are highly disappointed when their assertions of lineage are challenged because they feel like they’ve been judged unworthy of membership in an elite club. This isn’t really how I view the GSMD (especially considering that there may, in fact, be millions of Mayflower descendants), but many Americans do consider Mayflower (and Jamestowne) descendants to be our own version of nobility. Nobody likes to be rejected and rejection from a group imbued with cultural meaning can be especially painful. On the other hand, proof of lineage is, in my opinion, important far less from a “membership” perspective than from an historical one. This is why: it is important to get history as “right” as possible. Consider a high school American history textbook. Some of them are terrible; poorly written, under-researched, and almost always overly simplistic in their descriptions of complicated and complex events (for an interesting read, check out James W. Lowewen’s Lies my Teacher Told Me). Getting it wrong misinforms us about our heritage, our legacy, and who we are individually and collectively. It’s important for us to get it right, not just because it’s the principle of the thing, but also because the smaller facts add up to the larger story. We can learn an awful lot about our culture and society by understanding what happened to individual families over the generations. It does nobody good to accept less-than-adequate proof or reasoning. When we do that we misrepresent history. My mother’s parents were so circumspect about our ancestry that before I started to research it, all I knew was that their side of the family “was from Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky.” I found out about the possible connection to the Mayflower and Jamestowne on my own. I also found out about the undeniable fact of slave ownership on my own. What if I chose to fabricate a family history wherein some of my ancestors didn’t own slaves? To illustrate this point a little further: consider those women in lineages who become “brick walls.” We all know that recorded history favors men and their activities. How fascinating it would be to know the women’s stories as much as we know the men’s. Knowing their stories would add so much to our understanding. The same goes for many servants; to look at the historical record you might think that they just appear out of the blue, without parents or kin, and then disappear into the aether. And slaves! We have some slave narratives, of course, but very few slave lineages are known. But when we fill in these blanks for ourselves, whether it’s because we learned our families’ legends or because we downloaded a false GEDCOM from ancestry, we aren’t perpetuating knowledge. We are writing historical fiction. Historical fiction has its place, and personally, it’s one of my favorite genres. It may feel “true” and resonate with our understanding of the human condition (e.g., Johnny Tremain and Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), but to take fiction as one hundred percent factual history is a mistake. Since joining this page, I’ve been impressed and grateful that the experts in the group are so willing to share their knowledge and skills with the rest of us. They are like the expert reviewers of a peer-reviewed academic journal; it’s their job to look at your data and make sure that your analysis is rigorous and makes sense. If not, then you’re not furthering understanding. If your data is correct and, therefore your lineage is provable, you’ve added something valuable to the knowledge base. I think that I am a Mayflower descendant. But if I can’t provide proof of a lineage, it doesn’t make any sense for the GSMD to include me in their ranks. I would be okay with that because I wouldn’t think that the rejection was due to snobbery on their part. The rejection would be because they need to keep to rigorous and very important standards. And I would be grateful for the reviewer(s) who could point out where I went wrong.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 03:22:23 +0000
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