Reflections on Family History
I’ve been “doing family history” for about fifteen years now. As I’ve written previously, I got into this hobby midway through my PhD studies, when I’d read about as much nineteenth-century British Romantic writing and French theory as I could handle and was desperate for a change of scenery.
The initial years of building a family tree can be exhilarating. I think in those early days I was primarily relying upon the phenomenal free resources afforded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (These continue to be impressive.) I also had relatives, about whom I’ve written here before, who did so much of the really hard work. Eventually, I picked up an Ancestry.ca subscription for a period and really got going. (Ancestry.ca has deals every once and a while that are essentially impossible for a genealogy nerd to ignore. Works on me every time!)
All of which brings me to today.
My current family tree, which includes both my family and my wife’s family, contains just under 2500 people. At a glance, I can see the names for all 32 of my great-great-great grandparents and all 32 of Ruth’s great-great grandparents. The majority of these people were born in the 1820s. It’s wild to think that, for any one of my family lines, we have a window leading backwards over two hundred years. In the majority of cases, I have data on several generations before that as well.
In genealogical research, the focus is often either on moving things backwards — getting beyond “the brick wall” and uncovering parents or grandparents OR it’s about fleshing out one’s knowledge of specific generations — who’s whose sister or brother? what kind of work did they do? where did they live and when?
What I’ve done less often is reflect on family holistically. When I think about my kids and the family / families they come out of, what does all of this research tell me?
This is a hard question to answer. It probably has always been difficult to answer, since family is always heterogeneous, diverse, and discontinuous. Yet the major (and repeated) event of our family’s immigration to Canada from Europe makes it feels even more difficult to answer. There is a rootlessness that feels insurmountable.
Finding Roots
We recently took our family to Fort Edmonton Park. There is a new facility at the Park called the Indigenous Peoples’ Experience. It is expertly designed and does a good job of showcasing the rich cultural heritages and complex histories of Canada’s First People and Métis people. I was especially struck by the attention given to the role of language in expressing a culture’s deepest perspective and values.
It would be so awesome to learn Cree.
Among the many reflections that the visit brought to mind for me was the fact that this world contains such a beautiful variety of cultures. To witness some of these in the Indigenous Peoples’ Experience was a privilege.1 Living in a part of Edmonton that has benefited from several decades of immigration, I am likewise grateful for the richness and diversity in culture of those who have settled in Canada as well, including Iran, India, Lebanon, Somalia, and many other places.
I can trace my earliest family history in Canada to the late 1700s and in North America to the early 1600s. The majority of my family of course came over much more recently, although none of my grandparents were born outside of Canada. Of my great-grandparents, three on my mom’s side were born in Scotland and one was born in Canada. On my dad’s side, two were born in Canada and two were born in England, near the Wales border.
That feeling of rootlessness is one of the things that I have found family history helps with. The research of these last fifteen years has brought home to me just how specific and concrete each culture can be. This is a fact that our capitalistic milieu does not divulge easily. Much better — from the perspective of Capital — for things to be seen as essentially interchangeable and as having no unique, inherent value.
Yet when I think about the fact that my great-grandfather Donald Henderson would have likely called his father, athair, since they primarily spoke Gaelic on Tiree, I find some things that Capital cannot grasp: specificity and difference.
A Sense of Place
I am interested to know in what places the families in my tree have spent the longest period of time.
Right up near the top, of course, is Edmonton. Members of my family have been here since the late 1920s. Toronto would be even higher on the list. My great-grandfather Alexander Henderson moved there in 1917 and my aunt and uncle (and various cousins) still live there today.
Of course, the duration of time spent in any Canadian region is going to be capped by the date of that family line’s arrival. As I described in a different post, I suspect the award for the place in which my family has spent the longest period goes to New Brunswick. My ancestors arrived in 1780 or thereabouts and did not leave until sometime around when my great-grandmother Rhea Thomson passed away over two hundred years later in 1989 at her residence at Loch Lomond Villa in Saint John.
Across the pond, of course, the durations increase significantly, although it is difficult to get a lot of data due to dwindling records that exist the further we go back. For example, my great-grandfather William Wem came to Canada from Shropshire in England around the time of the First World War. Prior to that, his family had lived in Shropshire for at least 300 years, but likely much longer than that.2
My McKague ancestors, prior to arriving in Ontario around 1823, primarily lived in the northeast of Ireland in County Cavan. It is unclear how long they were situated there, however, as some histories suggest they came over to Ireland from Scotland less than a century earlier after fighting on the losing side of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion.
Some of the other places my family hail from include Hertfordshire and Kent (King), Yorkshire (Suddaby), Worcestershire (Randle), Lincolnshire (Harrison), and other counties and regions across England, Scotland, and Ireland. At a certain point, the families stop moving around, or at least start moving less.
Surveying this diverse cultural background — and I realize that saying “England, Scotland, and Ireland” does not actually sound diverse, but the strong regional identity within each of these relatively small countries nuances this quite a bit! — I can see a handful of concentrations. My grandmother Eileen (Wem) King’s family is largely from the same part of west England — Shropshire — and the one family in her line that is not from Shropshire is from the county immediately to the east, Staffordshire. The part of England that her family is from is sometimes called “the Welsh Marches” (not “marshes”) as it tended to go back and forth between England and Wales over the centuries.
Nevertheless, even this concentration begins to get fuzzy the further back we go, with certain lineages coming from Somerset in the south and even further afield. I suppose, in the end, that’s the challenge with all of these “where are we really from” exercises. There is no “true” origin. Even if I were to unlock all of genealogy and see the minute migrations that occur across generations, I might find families that stayed put for centuries, but not forever.
When I look at my wife’s family tree, for example, it has some very interesting lines, including one (Benner) that has been in Canada for over 200 years (since 1820), was in Ireland for 115 years before that (since 1705), and was in the Rhineland-Pfalz region of Germany for at least 200 years before that (since at least 1505 — but likely much earlier).
There is not really one origin, though.
Beauty in Discontinuity
Our inability to arrive at an origin could be seen as a challenge to finding a way out of the North American rootlessness. After all, wouldn’t an origin simply provide us with the anchor we are looking for? If I just knew that I “came from” County Cavan or the Isle of Tiree or whatever, then I’d be able to counter the capitalist narrative that I have no history to speak of besides my Amazon order history or my Google web history. I’d be able to say, instead, “No. See this continuity? I can draw it on a tree. Follow it backwards and you’ll eventually arrive here, in this precise place, which existed for centuries before Capital was even a twinkle in John D. Rockefeller’s eye.” The discovery that there is no true origin can be scary because it can feel like a loss.
I want to suggest, though, that discontinuity might provide even better resources to be drawn upon as tools for resisting the homogenizing force of Capital.
After all, the homogenizing force is not simply external to me — it is inside me as well. All of us, to borrow Walt Whitman’s phrase, “contain multitudes.” I am not simply “of Scottish stock” — nor simply “Canadian,” nor “a settler” — although I am also all of these things. I feel, within and without, the pressure to just be one thing, to bear a clear label about where I come from or where and what I am. To choose among the many threads of my family history as the identity I want to adopt feels inadequate.
Does it make a difference, say, if, as a person living in south Edmonton in 2025, I choose to learn Scottish Gaelic in an attempt to recover that ~50% of my ancestry that likely would have spoken that language as its mother tongue 150 years ago?
Would it be worth my children learning more about their German ancestry? Germany itself is a relatively recent invention — what about the Rhineland-Pfalz region itself (likewise a relatively recent creation)? What even is the culture of the Pfalz (Palatinate)? On Reddit, I noticed that someone suggested that the cultural history there leans towards French rather than Bavarian.3
My King family were papermakers for a number of generations in England. Would taking up papermaking help to reconnect me to roots? (I suspect it would and not only for family-history reasons).
The New Brunswick contingency were almost entirely United Loyalists coming out of the American Revolutionary War. Should I start adding the U.E. (United Empire) honorific after my name? (Probably not!)
Should I start eating Shropshire fidget pie? Or Shrewsbury Cake?
I recognize that there is a certain degree of the ridiculous in what I am suggesting above, and it seems like some might even see it as evidence that we should just let go of the past and embrace the undifferentiated mass that Capital offers up (a kind of “root stew” so to speak).
But, actually, I want to suggest that this is precisely the thing we should not do. Instead, I think we should try to encounter and recover ALL of the cultural snippets and off-shoots from our history that we can. This is a move towards the concrete. It is, in fact, an attempt to get specific about the multitudes that we each contain. And this specificity can bear witness to the fact that we contain within us cultures that have been in conflict historically but, in our very DNA, have suspended such conflict.
My Henderson ancestors were killed in the Massacre at Glencoe by soldiers from the Clan Campbell. Yet my ancestry includes Campbells among its many names. My kids’ ancestors from Germany were considered pariahs during their century-long sojourn in Ireland; however, only a few generations later, their descendants were marrying the descendants of Irish people whose families had been on the island for centuries.
Turning a blind eye to history lets Capital win. I suspect there could also be issues with overemphasizing one aspect of one’s family history at the expense of all the others. For example, I am often tempted to just lean into my Scottish ancestry whole hog — become fluent in Gaelic, wear a kilt to fancy events, and claim that haggis is my favourite meal. (Probably nothing wrong with any of those things if I were to do it.)
But, in some ways, this doesn’t account for history adequately. The reality of my family’s history is that we have this strange, diverse mix within us. And that is a gift. I may be half-Scottish in terms of ancestry, but my last name is about as English as it gets.
Embracing Difference
“Variety is the spice of life,” so said William Cowper, a poet that one of my favourite Romantic artists, William Blake, once illustrated for. If there’s one word that is almost antithetical to Capital and the values of our increasingly digitized world, it’s “variety.”
A walk down the modern supermarket aisle might lead us to want to dispute this claim. After all, the amount of variety in peanut butter brands alone is mind-boggling. Yet this is not true “variety.” True variety is a kind of specificity. It’s acknowledging and investigating and celebrating difference. And the thing about difference is that it’s all around us, even in the most apparently homogeneous of contexts. The drive to use broad brushstrokes and generalize is ever-present, yet it is death to the human spirit.
There may be a hundred brands of peanut butter, but few of these bear a truly specific history. In fact, the success of those peanut butter brands under capitalism will be at least partly dependent upon each one’s ability to make itself generic, repeatable, widely-appealing, etc. Families and cultures are not like that — cannot be like that — at all.
As William Blake once scribbled in the margin of a book:
To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit
- If I had one quibble with the exhibit, it would be that it elided the differences between the different Indigenous peoples themselves (although it did a relatively good job calling attention to the unique Metis history). It highlighted when a speaker was, say, Cree versus when the speaker was Nakota, but all of the comments were more or less lumped together otherwise. ↩︎
- The earliest Wem I can currently find is Richard Wem, born 1652. Another relative on the Wem family tree is Edward Davies, born 1617. Davies, notably, is a Welsh name. ↩︎
- The poster claims that there is a saying that bears this out: “Pfälzer – das will rote Hosen! (Palatine – that wants red trousers!)” Apparently, red trousers was a French fashion trend at the time. ↩︎