Ancestry

Family history has alway been a fascination, so I’m now trying to build out my ancestry on WikiTree¹ (though I’m a pretty amateur genealogist).

Goals

• Get beyond the basics (names, dates, locations) and into the stories
• Flesh out my tree enough to attract (“bait” in the WikiTree parlance) more participation to help with #1 ☝
• 🇩🇪 side: understand when/how/why the Berenses emigrated from Holland to Germany
• 🇮🇪 side: establish degrees of separation from James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats

Running list of insights

• Life used to be a lot harder. My paternal grandmother was born in Montana because her parents took an enticing homestead offer and relocated from Wisconsin. It turned out they were duped by the government and the railroad: the soil was crap/untillable. Facing possible starvation they escaped back to Wisconsin with the help of the Lutheran Church, which is why, as I understand it, my great-grandparents didn’t take kindly to it when my grandmother later converted to Catholicism (how could you turn your back on the institution that [literally] saved us?). There’s a book called Bad Land which describes the experience of my grandmother’s family and that of many of their unfortunate neighbors in that very inhospitable region of Montana. Reminds me of this quote which is unattributable:

  For you to be born required you to have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents…In fact, if you go back only 10 generations it took 4,096 ancestors for you to be here today. That’s 4,096 people who struggled, survived, loved, fought, won, lost, cried, and cheered. Your ancestors would have faced unbelievable adversity, collapses of governments and countries, world wars, starvation, extreme poverty, nasty diseases that there was no cure for, and so much more. Yet here we are complaining about how hard it is at a time where it has never been easier to be healthy, wealthy, and thrive. Imagine telling your great-great-grandfather how difficult your day was today. Your hardest day would be easier than the majority of his best days. You today live the life that your ancestors would have prayed for. You have the ability in today’s world to change your bloodline forever.