Delving into our ancestry and digging into our forebearer’s lives is a uniquely American obsession with tutorials and television programs explaining how, figuratively speaking, to dig up everyone who came before us.
The rest of the world — with some tragic exceptions — doesn’t share this obsession. People in other countries know their family history and who came before them because they have lived in the same place for centuries. People with tribal or ethnic connections are intimately acquainted with rituals and oral histories that serve to reinforce what they know about their ancestry.
Americans lack those solid connections to our personal pasts because, by definition, we’re misfits, outcasts and misfortunates. We have ancestors who were enslaved and ripped from their ancestral land. Starvation forced a good chunk of our predecessors to pull up stakes and sail to what, hopefully, amounted to salvation. Politics and religion sent some of us across the Atlantic where we tried to make a go of it, but not before we fought a bloody revolution to ensure our independence from tyranny and, by extension, the past.
Americans are a restless bunch with a history marked by constant uprooting. “Head west, young man,” “Fresh start,” “California or bust” — all of these expressions larded into our history are just different ways of saying, “Hey, I’m tired of being here and I want to make a new start.”
About 60 years after we got the United States of America up and running, this French guy named de Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to find out what the hell we were doing.
Being French, he could relate to the notion of revolting against authority. Being French, he could barely comprehend uprootedness and our unquenchable desire to see new horizons.
Old Alexis de T. probably came from some place in France where people had been living for centuries. In America, he found people who had maybe lived in the same place for a century, perhaps longer, and who were bound and determined to move to Ohio and then look longingly West toward — you guessed it — new horizons.
My dad’s dad loved genealogy and family history. With a cigar firmly clinched between his teeth, he created a gigantic scroll laboriously tracing our family roots back a century or more. His research linked us through my grandmother to James Fenimore Cooper and a couple other luminaries.
He also wrote a tome titled, “A Budtime Story,” beloved by his grandchildren. Subtitled “A Collection of Memoirs,” the hand-bound book is a loving tribute to what my grandfather loved most of all — family and its continuity through good times and bad.
He took care not to call it a diary or “a story of my complete life activity” and he praised my cousins for helping him organize the research he amassed.
The story begins fittingly with a foreboding photograph of my great grandfather and namesake. Grim determination defines his expression and he wears a Nordic-looking hat befitting a man who spent much of his life in frigid climes.
In its essence, “Budtime Story” is an immigration story focused on the late 19th century and early 20th century. It details how my great grandfather crossed the Atlantic as a cabin boy: “He stated that he was never given an order by his uncle without a slap in the face or a blow that sent him rolling.”
It recounts how “immigrant rail cars” were assigned 110 years ago to move people west. It also talks about how death claimed young lives with impunity in the early 20th century. My great grandmother had seven children and three died before they were a year old.
My grandfather ran the family paint store in a small Wyoming community during the Depression. He recalled a freezing day when no one came to the store until 5 p.m., when a man walked in asking for a refund on a gallon of paint he didn’t need.
During World War II, my grandparents crisscrossed the plains, driving from one community to another, in search of jobs and subsisting on snacks and a cup of coffee.
In his later years, my grandfather set himself and my grandmother smack dab in the middle of Paradise. They owned a succession of boats and spent their summers surrounded by family and friends fishing, drinking, laughing and looking for arrowheads.
In a tribute to his unflagging optimism, he spent his final years in a place called Sun City and, at the end of his life, I think he viewed his search for our family’s past not as a quest for origins but as a constantly retold tale about how the challenges one generation faces provide guidance and inspiration for the next, and the next one after that one.
