One of the tricks with genealogy is how much you find. What if you discover something you'd rather not know? For example, in my family, I've found out that we have a slave trader in our background. Is that information I try to let "die"?
We have two suicides in the 20th cy.; how much do we dance around that versus just talking openly about it?
A great-uncle or great-great-uncle on one side (no, I'm not telling any more) had a mistress, a fact fairly public at the time. Still, I feel like I shouldn't know this! But now that I do, what do I do with the information?
My grandmother was wrong about the name of her grandmother--apparently, the family had succeeded in destroying the fact that the actual mother had died when the kids were quite young, and the husband had remarried. Do I respect the family's c. 1900 wishes and follow the remarriage, or do we go with the truth? (And we have at least one other case of mistaken parenthood in another line, by the way.)
We have a diary of a dead relative, and it turns out that she had trouble getting along with another family member. We have a letter from a G-grandmother to another relative in the 1940's which reveals that the writer was a racist.
My grandmother, in her family history (a six-page document she created in the 1970's), clearly tried to whitewash everything, never mentioning anything negative about anyone. She gave a lot of useful information, but she deliberately skipped a lot. Was she right to do so?
I once asked her daughter, my aunt, if she knew why her father (my grandfather) had committed suicide. She shook her head adamantly and said, "Uh-uh, no way. I know, and no one else knows, and when I die, that dies with me." Was she right?
I don't have any answers. I'm just looking, thinking, and asking.
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4 comments:
I think your comment that you feel you shouldn't know about the mistress is a good barometer. If you feel uncomfortable with the knowing it, I wouldn't pass it on.
I think we ought to bring it all out - the good, the bad, the ugly. We tend to dance around the bad things instead of facing them head-on, heads held high. We are who we are because of our mistakes. They're what make us human.
What's done is done. The past is the past. We cannot change nor take responsibility for the things our ancestors did. So why hide the truth? Our ancestors are not us. But they were human, too, with the same strengths and weaknesses that we all are prone to. I heard someone say once that we should take neither credit nor blame for our ancestors. The flip side of hiding the shameful things of our ancestors is feeling self-important and prideful about the "illustrious" ones (with an equivalent amount of distortion of the truth in doing so). Perhaps we can learn something from the mistakes of the past without feeling personal shame for them. I, too, have skeletons in my genealogical closet, but I don't think hiding them will make them go away.
What an interesting post. I often ask myself the same questions. Here are a few of the personal guidelines; I’ve come up with for myself. If I find out something potentially hurtful about some one who was personally known by people still living, I keep my mouth shut. For example I found a couple who married in the 1920’s a year after their first child was born. Some of their children are still living so I have not told the family the truth about their parents out of fear it would upset or embarrass them.
However, I agree with Lance in other circumstances. I think telling the facts helps us understand individuals. My husband’s grandfather hardly ever spoke of his own father and when he did it was not positive. As we have learned more about his great grandfathers life, it has been easier to understand him. He came to America from Sweden, he lost seven of nine children before they reached adulthood, his first wife died in childbirth and he struggled with unemployment. It would be easy for a person in that position to turn bitter. It also explained much of the way Scott’s grandfather dealt with his own children.
I also think by telling the truth we can see our ancestors’ humanness. We can learn from how they dealt with the situations in their life for good or for bad. They dealt with the same issues we do health, money, family life etc…however in a very different culture than ours. I’ve heard it said that we should not judge our ancestors by our standards. The aforementioned grt-grandfather left two of his children in an orphanage. I was aghast when I first heard the story. As time went on I came to learn that was often their only safety net. If you didn’t have food to put on the table and there was no one to go to putting children in an orphanage was acceptable in that time period. (Even with that said I can’t imagine the pain that poor man must of gone through)
All in all, I think as family historians we share what we find out and let each person make their own judgments.
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