Ancestral Legacy: A Treasure Waiting to be Opened

As we begin a new Sage-ing Ancestry Circle each fall, I like to welcome new members with some numbers:

• Each of us had 2 biological parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc.
• Counting back nine generations to the American Revolution, each of us had 512 biological ancestors in just the 1700s generation.
• Add in cousins to get thousands of ancestral stories to tell, per person, if we could somehow find them all.

We won’t find them all.  But we will find at least some of them, despite lapses in record-keeping that have inevitably occurred.  Then, among us in our new Circle, we will have more ancestors than were living in all of North America in the 1700s: Native Americans, Europeans, Africans—ancestors from everywhere.

Now just imagine all those stories strung together.  There will be happy stories and sad stories, stories of war and of peace, of joy and of social crises. Of saints and sinners and convicted criminals. Of legitimate and illegitimate births. Of heroism and grief. Of peasants and nobility. Of comedy and tragedy.

Each of us will find the complete spectrum of human experience and behavior among our ancestors, some of it requiring us to swallow hard, or feel pride, or shed tears, or be amazed, or celebrate triumphs of the spirit.  Here are a few of the actual discoveries our Circle group has made in the past 4 years:

• At the Battle of Gettysburg, three granddads shot directly at one another, and all missed.
• Two of our families knew the young Thomas Edison: One hosted him as he installed wiring in the first building on earth to be built with electricity (Ohio); the other was an illiterate Italian immigrant who shoveled coal into the boilers of the world’s first electric plant (Manhattan).
• A chocolate lover discovered that Milton Hershey was her great granddad.
• A shy person discovered that the real Lady Godiva of ancient Wales was her grandma.
• A passionate horse-lover learned her great-uncle was a famous cowboy from the Dakotas.
• Five soldiers, on both sides, were all there when Washington crossed the Delaware.
• Our ancestors included descendants of seven different passengers on the Mayflower.
• A granddad working on the docks in Baltimore actually saw the “Star-Spangled Banner” – now in the Smithsonian – as it waved over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.
• Two families living 15 miles apart survived the Great Michigan Forest Fire (1881) that spurred the founding of the American Red Cross and actually met Clara Barton in the ruins.

The list goes on and on:  There were war heroes, inventors, discoverers and religious leaders, including a Pope. Our ancestors lived through the Gold Rush, the Holocaust, famines and natural disasters.

In just four years of Ancestry Circle, we’ve seen it all.  And now 40+ families have creative legacies to show for it, including books, websites, scrapbooks, kids’ books, family cookbooks, and more.

Curious?  Consider joining the next SI Ancestry Circle this September and find your own amazing forebears.  See what they tell you about who you are, and how they help you feel that you’re standing today on hallowed ground.