From outside the box

A few years ago my sister Celeste took on the tedious and overwhelming task of researching our families history. I respect and appreciate the hard work and many hours she put into this chore, but I have to ask the question....How seriously should anybody take their family history?

Shortly after my father died back in 1989, I found out to my surprise, as well as to the surprise of my other siblings, that we had an older sister. This lady (I don't even know her name) had been doing some research on her own, about who her real father was, and found out it was my father. Ends up that he had gotten a girl pregnant when he was a teenager back in the 1920's, before any of my other siblings were born, and my Dads family paid some money or something to make the problem go away....not abortion....just go away, out of my dads life.

So what does this all mean to family history trees? It means that unwanted pregnancies, secret affairs, wives getting pregnant by the butler and never revealing the truth to their husbands, the white mans raping of slaves and Indians, kids thinking their real mother is their aunt and their grandparents are their parents, these things have been going on forever, and therefore your lineage may or may not be who and what it appears to be. Knowing this and seeing that it has happened in my own family, is why my own family history means nothing to me, or at the least, something that should be taken with a grain of salt.

I always get a kick out of hearing people talk about the need to return to the moralities of the good old days, back when we had true family values. The family values of the good old days incorporated a better system for hiding the truth. There was no DNA sampling, abortions were more dangerous and less common than today, affairs and out of marriage pregnancies were more frowned on, and therefore, these things had to be hidden.

So just keep it in mind when you are told that you are descended from royalty or Daniel Boone or George Washington, that the truth of your lineage may be connected to the lineage of Grandmas milkman or one of great, great, great, great grandpa's slaves. But in truth, does it really matter?