Family, Genealogy, and Dreams
I have been reading Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, and enjoying it very much on the whole, although at times it is very difficult to have his extraordinarily good writing probe deeply into my fiber and make me think so much about things over which I seem to have no control, therefore no ability to change, for better or worse. It reminds me of years past when I would watch 60 Minutes on Sunday night and spend the next week fuming about the items they'd discussed, things that mattered, and mattered much, but about which I was powerless to do anything as an individual. I would fume and rant and be upset for a week, and then I'd sit down to another issue of 60 Minutes on Sunday night and it would start all over again for another week. My answer: I stopped watching 60 Minutes. I'm not sure that's the right answer, but it was the only one I could find at the time. I recently spoke with Bonnie on video chat and she said about the same thing. Now I've started taking the newspaper again (Richard and I were out at Luke AFB with two friends for the wonderful air show they put on every year -- not to be missed, and it's free, to boot) and I'd been thinking about getting out of the blinders I'd been behind and start to take part in the world again, not just read the items that I chose to read on the internet news, but look at ALL OF IT. So I subscribed to the paper and got two needed chairs as a bonus that allowed us to stay longer at the show than we otherwise would have been able to).
But back to the book. I'm about 4/5 of the way through it, reading quite slowly, and just now he's in his visit to Kenya, to a world he really knows quite little about, and he's visiting "family" and learning about the real interactions of all the inlaws and step-brothers and -sisters and others who are tied by genetics and stories and photo albums. As he was describing a moment, visiting with his step-mother, a later wife of his father, and looking at their photo album, at all the smiling faces and posed portraits, I realized that most of our photographic "memories" are just like that: posed moments in time that don't necessarily reflect the reality of the time. Beyond the thoughts regarding our own photo albums, I began to think about the genealogical research I've been doing in a very different light. Up until now, the names of people I've found who are great-great grandfathers and grandmothers and beyond have been just that: names that conjure up images of what they might have been like. They appeared to me in my visions of them as still photographs, without the faces -- just names that, nonetheless, were happy people, doing their farming or traveling, or barbering, or whatever else they did, and living out their lives as I knew my parents and their parents had done.
But I never took account of the fact that some of them might not have been nice people, or that some of them may have been scoundrels... and surely some of them were. I'll come back to this later....
But back to the book. I'm about 4/5 of the way through it, reading quite slowly, and just now he's in his visit to Kenya, to a world he really knows quite little about, and he's visiting "family" and learning about the real interactions of all the inlaws and step-brothers and -sisters and others who are tied by genetics and stories and photo albums. As he was describing a moment, visiting with his step-mother, a later wife of his father, and looking at their photo album, at all the smiling faces and posed portraits, I realized that most of our photographic "memories" are just like that: posed moments in time that don't necessarily reflect the reality of the time. Beyond the thoughts regarding our own photo albums, I began to think about the genealogical research I've been doing in a very different light. Up until now, the names of people I've found who are great-great grandfathers and grandmothers and beyond have been just that: names that conjure up images of what they might have been like. They appeared to me in my visions of them as still photographs, without the faces -- just names that, nonetheless, were happy people, doing their farming or traveling, or barbering, or whatever else they did, and living out their lives as I knew my parents and their parents had done.
But I never took account of the fact that some of them might not have been nice people, or that some of them may have been scoundrels... and surely some of them were. I'll come back to this later....