Family History DayImage by David Mark from Pixabay

Family History: They Were Story Changers!

/in , , , , , , , /by

Tomorrow is Family History Day. The day honors the busiest day ever recorded at Ellis Island. April 17, 1907 was a milestone date, with 11,747 immigrants passing through towards their dream of making a new start in America. 

Family History in Context

Ellis Island is a symbolic place to many Americans, primarily those whose ancestors came from Europe. All Americans share a sense of resiliency, no matter the background of their ancestors. The vast majority of Americans share a sense of settling and starting anew from other places, while all, including indigenous peoples maintain special linkages to their historical traditions.

We are a nation of hybrids! Connected both to the United States, as well as to the roots of where our people come from.

Our Story Changers

What stands out to me on Family History Day is the strength and courage that our ancestors collectively shared. Whether giving up everything to save for a ticket to New York, or surviving the ordeal of the Middle Passage, our ancestors were Story Changers. Courageous and inspiring people who through luck, planning, resiliency or determination changed and built their own story — leading to ours today. Amazing!

Perceiving Our Story Changers Through Writing

Today in particular I celebrate the Story Changers we each descend from. And the Story Changers we all our individually — creating the pathway for future stories.

Journal writing is an incredible way to tap into the resiliency and wisdom of our individual and collective ancestors. The story of our families fall into three buckets: what’s known, unknown or hidden.

  • Known is available through records, stories and personal contact.
  • Unknown includes the fact we all descend from 4 grandparents, 8 great-grands, 16 great-greats and on and on. But as time passes we can lose some of those names and stories and information.
  • Hidden includes information that was destroyed, altered, or concealed, often to protect the secrets of others. Hidden information ranges from the identities of the biological parents of adoptees to the tribal connections of enslaved people.

Family History

Ancestry DNA testing is bringing more and more unknown or hidden information accessible and into the light. While empowering to discover, this information can also be unsettling. It can be a complicated experience of joy, mixed with the frustration or grief of what is or had been withheld from you.

Our intuition and perception can be an amazing tool to process unknown or hidden information as it is discovered, or to fill gaps where discovery is not possible. Insight Writing in your journal is a great way to tap your own intuition.

In honor of Family History Day I have shared a free guided meditation audio file on Insight Timer – Dialogue with Ancestors: A Meditation for Journal Writing. I invite you to walk in the shoes of your ancestors for a moment, and then write in your journal with their inspiration.

Celebrate your very own Story Changers today. And as you do so you are paving the stories of tomorrow.

 

Learn More About Your Story Changers

Your journal is an amazing resource to process what’s known, unknown or hidden about your own family and your Story Changers. I’m excited to announce the first of my classes and tools:

Understand Yourself & Your Family: Writing from the Head, the Heart and Your Own Gut Instinct

The first two sessions are open for registration now! Watch for specially designed tools and information coming me soon.

‘The Foundling’: My Inspiration

/in , /by

For over 25 years working in the change management field I’ve always been inspired by the stories and case studies of people with an inner power of self-resiliency and the ability to lead when others want to run away. As I began the journey to find my father-in-law’s biological family I found myself gravitating towards stories written by the genealogically bewildered. It’s hard enough to be anchored in you as you when you’ve known all the facts and details your whole life! Even more complicated to find that sense of inner calm and confidence when major details are missing, withheld or concealed.

I’m still most greatly inspired by the first story I read in this space, ‘The Foundling‘, by Paul Joseph Fronczak. My initial interest in the book was because I grew up knowing about this story that had been huge headline news a few years prior to my own birth, and based in the neighborhood in Chicago where my mother was from. But it’s the honesty of his story, and struggle and desire to both be fully himself and also support his biological family as well as the family who raised him that really stays with me. Truly an inspiring story reminding us all that each of us has the power to be uniquely you, and to chose which aspects of nature and nurture you want to reinforce, and those you want to redo.

Photo from http://www.foundlingpaul.com/blog

Is ‘Genealogical Bewilderment’ really a thing?

/in /by

It is. Psychologists Erich Wellisch and H.J. Sants named the phenomenon in 1964, while working with adoptees. The term refers to their observation that missing details about your own ancestry can lead to an experience of ‘genealogical bewilderment’.

I’ve been on a quest recently to find the biological family of my deceased father-in-law, who I never had the chance to meet. Every answer my husband and I celebrated created dozens of new questions and emotions. When I stumbled on the term genealogical bewilderment in a May, 2018, article by The Atlantic, the long and clumsy term made sense right away.

Ashley Fetters wrote about the concept in her article, Finding the Lost Generation of Sperm Donors:

There’s a name for that feeling—that curiosity, that sense of a missing piece, that anxiety that some dormant aspect of themselves might one day show up and have no traceable root. In 1964, the psychologists Erich Wellisch and H.J. Sants, who studied and treated troubled adoptees, understood the lack of knowledge of one’s genetic background to induce a state of what they called “genealogical bewilderment.”

Since then it seems only a niche group of psychologists have published anything further about the term.

I believe the term is due for a resurgence. I think it could be like the mighty at sign (@) or hashtag (#) symbols that might have faded into oblivion had technology not introduced the need for them in email addresses and social media respectively. The term genealogical bewilderment was originally used to describe the experience of adoptees. But as the popularity of ancestry DNA testing grows, I wonder if we’ll see a renewed use of this term that also seems to relate to people of other backgrounds. For example, beyond the donor-conceived that Fetters mentioned in her article, there are those getting “not parent expected” (NPE) results from ancestry tests, such as a child they never knew existed or that a parent who raised them is not actually biologically related. Not to mention all the half- or full- siblings, uncles and cousins who are discovering new family members as well.

Wellisch and Sants called the opposite of genealogical bewilderment, ‘ancestral closure’. I suspect ‘ancestral journey’ is a more accurate description. For now, I’m finding some comfort (while I wish for closure) just in that the bewilderment label exists. Something about the existence of the term, with the word ‘logical’ right in the middle reassured me that we’re going to be OK on this journey of learning my father-in-law’s story no matter how many more twists we decide to follow.