I know a lot of my family history and that of my husband and it’s really not pretty. Some of it is not really suitable for young children, like the brothers who kept slaves in the dark wet basement (until the family went bankrupt and moved to Kansas). Even the one ancestor my MIL was so proud of… well, I don’t think I’m that much in favor of putting down a worker’s rebellion quite so violently. My father was a war correspondent during WW2 and he wouldn’t talk about it–other than to say that the experience made him into an atheist, because no just god would create such a hell on earth. I have family genealogies on both sides, with stories that would appeal to kids (the pet bear) and stories that give me nightmares (the facts about those slaves).
I actually had a teacher who tried to get us interested in our family trees–way back before there were all the databases that exist now. It caused some problems.
First, there’s adoption. I have a neighbor who grew up in an orphanage with a sister. They know they were sisters, but were never told the names of their parents. So, imagine being them and having a teacher assign them to investigate their family tree. (Heck these days teachers never do blood typing in class…THAT causes problems too.)
I know adoptees who love their families, but just don’t have any interest in finding out the family history of their adoptive family. It’s not always the student who is adopted. Sometimes, it’s a parent or grandparent. So, either you lie to the kid and trace the adoptive family’s roots or you explain “Grandma is adopted; she doesn’t know anything about her bio family.”
Then there are families that have secrets that kids don’t need to know and shouldn’t know. “Grandpa went to prison for murder.” If you think that’s preposterous… you should see one episode of “Who Do You Think You Are.” It turned out the man the celebrity thought was his father wasn’t. It turned out the people his mother thought were her parents weren’t. In two other episodes, people had faked their own deaths, assumed different names, and had other families.
I love doing genealogy, but I can tell you that, even with the limited number of family trees I’ve investigated I’ve had people get really angry when I tell them that the family history they’ve been told is wholly fiction. They insist you are WRONG.
Tony: if it is any comfort to you, the family histories compiled by women in my family are pretty much fantasy. They tell a whole lot more about the author than anything else. And, of course, that is interesting itself.
First hand accounts are priceless, but frequently unconsciously biased. I’m a newcomer to my locale, living in an antique house. The family that built it died out. Neighbors tell me all about them. The stories are very different. I write down all the versions, including those demonstrably false. Some are very good tales that I compare to tales the amateur historians in my family told me.
Good discussion which I somehow thought was on the Parents forum…not the cafe! (Apologies to,the mods).
I have to say…I wish our HS teachers had done some work on genealogy. That would have been interesting!
“the family histories compiled by women in my family are pretty much fantasy. They tell a whole lot more about the author than anything else”
LOL @alh. My mother’s brother published a memoir. “Full of LIES!” my mother snapped after reading it – and during reading it she threw it to the ground a couple of times. It was fairly entertaining to watch. This uncle and I were fairly close and I read the book when I was 18. Then I was pretty impressed. Today, I just chuckle at what a big pile of bs it all was. The hutzpah!
It does get dicey. My D’s 11th grade AP English teacher was very into genealogy. Two of their large projects required the students to delve into genealogy. Problem is, in one of them, the students were required to use the US census records. The students who didn’t have generations of any of their ancestors in the US census records (i.e. recent and moderately recent immigrant families) were supposed to choose someone else to trace. So the pretty cool project wasn’t so cool for some students.
Regarding famous or infamous ancestors, if you go back several hundred years in the areas of the world where your ancestors lived, you probably descend from everyone who lived there at the time, other than those whose lineages shortly died out.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemagnes-dna-and-our-universal-royalty/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal-we/302497/
Post # 4- I agree! I hated all of the military/political history as taught. Domestic history much more interesting. So much more meaningful to realize how we got to where we are today because of inventions and events that influenced everyday life. I got A’s but hated to memorize and it did not stick. I couldn’t care less who was king of wherever and when. Learning that conditions, political, environmental et al changed the world is interesting. The potato famine. Religious or other persecution. Etc.
“Regarding famous or infamous ancestors, if you go back several hundred years in the areas of the world where your ancestors lived, you probably descend from everyone who lived there at the time, other than those whose lineages shortly died out.”
Correct. In fact back when The Da Vinci Code was popular is was pointed out by some math-minded population scientists that a major flaw in the plot was that Sophie Neveu Saint-Clair was special because she was a direct descendant of the historical Jesus. They showed that if Jesus had any descendants living today then the odds were enormously high that, over a span of 2000 years, EVERYONE in the world alive today would also be descended from Jesus. And we’d all be descended from Pontius Pilate too, assuming his lineage did not die out within a few generations after he lived.
Well, maybe not everyone (due to the existence of small isolated populations in a few places around the world), but here is the article that you may be referring to: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2006/03/why_were_all_jesus_children.html
I hated history, but got high A’s–only because I was a good at memorization. Every year, same thing–start with Columbus, move forward,usually getting to about JFK, maybe Nixon.
One of my biggest regrets is not talking to my grandparents about their grandparents and family history. By the time I started on genealogy, they were gone. I lived with grandparents while attending college…
They had a 1875 buffet handed down. I dusted it every week, but never opened the drawers. When we dismantled the house, we discovered the entire thing was chock full of family records back to the 1840’s–original land grants, pictures from Civil War era, military records, 1800’s will and marriage certificates–it was a treasure trove.
I don’t understand the reluctance of some posters that one might find unfavorable or sordid details. Good or bad, that’s part of humanity and history. Any projects would need to be age appropriate. I do think students today are far less sheltered than we were. Drugs, unplanned pregnancy, jail time,etc? Those type of things don’t seem to phase the students at my local school.
I don’t understand the reluctance, either. Good or bad, it’s our family history. And we are not responsible for what others did, but the bad is part of life. I think I would want to know.
I think everybody has ancestors who were guilty of this.
While that’s true, it’s understandable that some may not be too keen to find out an ancestor of theirs committed heinous crimes because they feel associated with it due to having related DNA with that individual. This is especially the case if the victims of such crimes are still alive and/or the effects of such crimes still affect their descendants.
And even more so if there’s still some strong stigmatization and sometimes even legal consequences for that association.
In the case of South Korean descendants of Korean collaborators of Imperial Japan during the 1910-1945 Imperial Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula, there’s been policies…including recent ones within the last few years to strip them of all lands/assets which could be traced to their collaboration with the Imperial Japanese occupiers and prioritize redistribution of them to descendants of Korean patriots who fought against the Japanese occupation for Korean independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinilpa
Similarly, the strong stigmatization of Chinese folks who collaborated with the Imperial Japanese on both sides of the Taiwan straits has been strong for so long that it was only within the last few decades that they’ve been willing to be publicly interviewed without anonymization.
And even then, many Chinese from both sides of the Taiwan straits even in my generation and especially older still tend to strongly stigmatize them as traitors. Especially those from Taiwan who served in the Imperial Japanese armed forces as the vast majority of them were volunteers, not conscripts as Imperial Japan didn’t start introducing conscription in Taiwan until 1944-45.
when I learn about history or politics which I love, I do not try to relate like oh my goodness what if I was leaving in a place with the plague and open sewage and famine and war. I just find it interesting and I do enjoy looking at historic photos but not just ones where my grandparents x 10 generations may have come from. I am interested in all of humanity (and nature too) .
@sryrstress wrote:
Sure it is, but…not everyone wants to share those sordid details with a classroom teacher and/or the entire class. And I think parents have the right to their privacy from their kids. It’s one thing if the issue is one several generations removed. It’s another if it involves a living parent, grandparent, or even great grandparent.
So, what if the 1940 census shows that grandpa was in an institution for the criminally insane?(That’s especially problematic if the grandchild is already being bullied.) Or what if great-gramps was a SS officer in Nazi Germany? Or what if grandpa drove drunk and killed several people? What if great gramps was a member of the Klu Klux clan? What if grandma’s parents were polygamists? What if grandma was arrested dozens of times for prostitution?
Maybe you’re right and none of these would phase the kids…maybe it’s the PARENTS who feel squeamish about sharing the information.
I have an ugly “secret” in my family tree which involves my great-grandparents. When I made it “public” within my extended family, one of my (much) older cousins was angry. It turned out he had known for years, but didn’t think that sort of thing should be shared, even with relatives.
This woman discovered her family secret.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/29/world/my-grandfather-would-have-shot-me/index.html?eref=edition
I can’t imagine a teacher somehow forcing a child to share information. Many people would be selective about what they choose to share and delve into.
@busdriver the point is THE TEACHER would know. And if the kid’s supposed to give an oral report and doesn’t…there will be a lot of curious classmates asking personal questions.
When I was in high school, my teacher actually had us do oral presentations about our family tree to the entire class BEFORE submitting our final written report. One of my classmates–whose dad was a physician known to half the people living in the area–got up and did a report about her mother’s family. The teacher immediately asked about her father’s. (Yep, not the smartest move.) She said that her father didn’t know much about his family and she hadn’t been able to find any written records. She took the lousy grade. But after that class report, half the town was buzzing about the fact “Dr. B’s daughter said she didn’t know anything about his family. There must be some awful secret there.” (Adoption is very common in my family, so my mother’s guess was Dr. B probably was.)
Our teacher was interested in demographic info–how old our parents were when they married, when they had their first child, when we were born, etc. I do not doubt that a lot of my classmates gave fake answers to those questions :)!
Seriously, I love genealogy…but I don’t think it’s something that high school age kids should be doing in class.
I agree it is an invasion of privacy. The teacher can share his own family research as an example if he chooses.
I come from one of those hundreds of years of family documents in the buffet families. There are family cemeteries… In my 30s, before the internet really got going, a friend was trying to locate the graves of her ancestors. It took me a while to figure out these were unmarked pauper’s graves. It was eye opening for me.