Do you ever share who you are?

[sovay]

One of the stories I sometimes tell about Ludwig Wittgenstein has to do with the time in the winter of 1936/37 when he went around apologizing to his friends for having failed to tell them he was Jewish. Specifically, he was apologizing for having allowed them to think that only one of his four grandparents was Jewish when in fact the ratio went the other way. The Nuremberg Laws were in force in Germany; these niceties of number mattered. (It should be noted that Wittgenstein's three Jewish-born grandparents had all converted as adults to Catholicism and his one non-Jewish grandparent was the matrilineal one: no beit din in Austria would have ruled him or his siblings Jewish. Nazi Germany didn't care. The surviving family got out after the Anschluss because of their money, not their Catholic education.) It was part of a larger pattern of confession that Wittgenstein was working out that winter, some for lies of omission and some for actions of which he was ashamed, and my impression is that none of his friends found it actually changed their opinions of him except insofar as some of them were not impressed by his ideas of a convenient time to come over.

Wittgenstein, of course, apologized almost constantly for being alive, which is why I personify the same tendency in myself as Tiny Wittgenstein, the gloomy little shoulder philosopher with his kite-wings and leather jacket whom selkie periodically traps inside a jam-jar so I can get something done; I find it even more relatable than his well-documented love for detective fiction and the musicals of Carmen Miranda. One of his other apologies during that confessional winter was for having let people think he had no sexual experience of women. That one fascinates me because I can't tell whether he intended to correct the assumption that he was sexually inexperienced or the assumption that he was experienced only with men, but either way it was again an apology for not having disclosed fully the particulars of himself—for existing under false pretenses.

I hope my friendlist appreciates that I haven't rung anyone up to come by and explain in person that actually I am descended in part from early American colonists, even though I feel really weird about it.

The continuity of family I was raised with was my mother's side. When I speak of my grandparents, I mean her parents. At night when I couldn't sleep, my mother would tell me the long, winding story of immigrations and migrations and marriages as far back as she knew, starting in a scatter across Eastern Europe and eventually converging, not in New York City where her parents were born in separate neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but in Iowa City where they met at the same graduate program for psychology and eloped. (An American Jewish love story, nu?) If I stayed awake, she would tell me of their travels, and of her own, and of meeting my father—this time in New York—and moving first to Philadelphia and then to Boston, where somewhat to their surprise they remain today. My father's father's side has an extremely traceable name, but we knew more about their history in Wales and Ireland (not in our case Austria) than we did about their movements here, since my father's father was born in San Francisco before 1906 and when your birth certificate is lost in an earthquake and fire you can tell people any damn thing about yourself that you please. My father's mother's side was a lacuna. Very recently, however, my father got into their genealogy and in consequence I am now looking at a scanned page attesting to the presence of her family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. This summer we determined that one of the branches of spatch's ancestry went back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. We knew already about the ancestor who founded Newburyport, the ancestor who was involved in the Salem witch trials—I found the link to the Reverend Nicholas Noyes sufficiently weird that I wrote a poem about it. Now we're trying to figure out if we're related.

It is not a matter of innocence. I was born in America, into the history of America, and that means I benefit from its genocides and its slaveries whether my ancestors were on the spot for them or not; my responsibility to the present and the future of this country is the same. But I am used to thinking of myself as descended from people on the margins of one sort or another and for at least a quarter of myself that is not true. It feels a little alien. In other words, I am much more unsettled to find myself with a strain of the Colonial-era WASPs Lovecraft so fetishized than I would be by any equivalent revelation of fish people, which is not news to me in the abstract, but in the personal means I write about it by way of Wittgenstein, who at least knew about his ancestry all along, even if he did get hit rather suddenly with what it meant.

I suppose I should watch a Technicolor musical to complete the metaphor, but I have a crushing headache and suspect I will instead go to sleep.

Comments

[alexxkay]

I am not sure why, but this whole post delights me.

Possibly because it is Very You, and I like you a lot :-)

[thistleingrey]

Back as far as the seventeenth century, one has so many ancestors that one or another in a particular place need not signify unless you want it to. (Some people really, really want it to, disproportionately. But it's still just the one person amidst--at that remove--dozens.)

[ethelmay]

I have a pair of ancestors who were married in Duxbury in 1639. I guess that's Plymouth Colony rather than Massachusetts Bay Colony, but not far, anyway. Another pair were both Mayflower passengers.

[gwynnega]

No one in my family has been in this country for more than a few generations (and my mom is first generation American), and I know very little about my European ancestors, so I can only imagine how odd it would feel to find out about American colonial ancestry. In general, though, I think it's amazing and fascinating to be able to trace one's ancestors back that far in a concrete way.

[sara]

Huh. We might also be cousins: my mother's people were also in Massachusetts at that time. She's a Mann family descendant, and a (somewhat later) house of theirs is now a museum in Scituate. One of my cousins (dad's side, but we're the kind of family that find this stuff interesting) went to visit when she was teaching in Boston, more than a decade ago now, but I've never gone.

[selkie]

Lookit hims in his habitat jar, I added some fallen seasonal leaves and a tiny tweed muffler, you can tell he likes it because he’s all morosely folded on himself and gazing contemplatively.
*shake shake shake shake*
His winter metabolism is slow but tomorrow I will lower a peppermint-stick Awful Awful and a nip of Pernod through one of the air holes.

[thisbluespirit]

I'm trying not to say, "ooh, how interesting!" but I love family history so I can't help it - how fascinating!!

Family history is weird, though, definitely, and not always comfortable. But I think when we're talking 16th C ancestors, it is pretty removed, and also, whatever else they may or may not have done, not your ancestors from the 1630s fault that modern people fetishize them. They probably just wanted to get out of England or wherever and Radical Religious Sect properly in peace dammit and would be also be weirded out.

(My surname has a probably-eventually related branch that went to New England in the 17th C & have a genealogical book written on them so I wind up being too scared to contact US cousins (despite being from the definitely-related-to-me emigrated in 19th C side) because they all start sounding as if we're part of some sort of magically Chosen People and are all related and aristocratic (we might be the former, it's possible, but nobody has yet found the connect between my branch and the early New England branch; the latter, we're not, we probably just owe our origins to a questionable or formidable medieval lady) and I never know how to deal with them! It is very strange, although also understandable, I suppose. People want to connect with things and be special, either with where they are, or somewhere else.

And on the fish side, that's a lot of sea journeys, all told, so you can't rule it out.

I trust that no one has yet fallen into a cesspit or died in a sewer, anyway. (My family take being common as muck way too literally for my liking.)

♥

[mrissa]

It could happen to anyone. My own morfar's far changed his name to George Adams to get away from his birth family because it was a touch less obvious than John Smith, so who on earth knows what's back there, except that he wanted it to stay back there. I see how it slides things around strangely. I do sympathize.

[cmcmck]

Leaving aside the official rulings, I've been amused more than once by Jewish friends on here telling me: 'if you want to be Jewish, you're Jewish'. :o)

I know almost nothing about my Latvian ancestry which saddens me deeply.

[redbird]

It's not a matter of innocence, and also, it's complicated.

True statement: my paternal grandparents were immigrant factory workers whose first language was Yiddish (I've seen the census record).

True statement: my father was a judge, and when I was applying to college as an undergraduate, I listed him on Yale's application form because he made me a "legacy" applicant.

Either of those, by itself, implies a somewhat different story. They are both part of the story of my life, because I grew up with four living grandparents, all of whom I saw regularly. (Which, come to think of it, is another true statement which suggests things about who I am and where I come from.)

[moon_custafer]

When I speak of my grandparents, I mean her parents.

I’d been meaning for a while to ask whether your grandfather who saw the opening night of The Cradle Will Rock was the same one who accidentally exploded a baseball during a university convocation — I take it from this he was?

[julian]

My dad's family helped found Dedham in 1636, so I hear you. (I just feel weird about it because I think of myself as an outsider, not because I think of my people as outsiders. Rather the opposite.)

[brigdh]

Ancestors are weird. My own family arrived in the US in 1699, in Virginia; my Jewish girlfriend's family arrived recently from Sicily, and yet in many ways her childhood was the old-school WASP stereotype that mine very much wasn't. And yet, is there something meaningful to the ways our heritage differs, specifically in their American historical connections? It's hard to say it's entirely irrelevant. Though, like you, I think it's too easy to check off the boxes of "my ancestors owned slaves or not, that makes me personally guilty or not", "my ancestors were involved in any of the many American tragedies or not, that makes me responsible or not"; a white American today is treated as a white American, regardless of their genealogical record.

I have the documentation that would allow me to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, if I wanted, though that type of ostentatious ancestor-praising doesn't appeal to me. (Though I've heard gossip that the DAR in NYC had a violent split into two groups: one politically conservative and mostly white, the other liberal and mostly people of color, which is fascinating enough that I'd almost join just to find out more.)

I do think it's fascinating that other countries don't seem to have quite the same relationship to their ancestors as Americans do. For example, I've never seen a Russia person claim to descend from serfs and/or feel guilty for their family owning serfs, even though that was abolished only in the 1860s. I've never seen French people arguing about their responsibilities based on what side their ancestors took in the French Revolution. Is it because it was easier for descendants of the two groups to blend, while American tragedies tended to leave their descendants with ethnic markers? Or some other reason? Do I maybe just not know enough French or Russian people, and in fact this is a thing that gets argued about?

[asakiyume]

It's ironic, isn't it, that a thing that would be a point of bragging to someone else is something you feel unsettled by, but it makes sense, since it rubs against your love for and identification with the margins. ... Of course in their way the settlers in Massachusetts Bay Colony were people on the margins too--their fetishization happened later.

As you say, there is no innocence. As human beings, we're guaranteed to have ancestors who've done--or been complicit in, or benefited from--terrible things. But that's not the whole of who we are, and it's not our destiny.

[a_reasonable_man]

What a fascinating and self-narrative-unsettling piece of information! I think about my own ancestry a lot, and mine is like yours, in that one line are Jews who arrived in the U.S. from Eastern Europe early in the twentieth century, and other line goes way back in this country. I know of two ancestors, a Scotch Irish man and wife, who landed in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1772. There are slaveholders on my family tree, and those who displaced Native Americans. I can name a few of them. There also are some I'm prouder of, but for some reason, I've always drawn to write history mostly about New Englanders. You of course, set many of your beautiful stories in New England and now it turns out you have ancestry here. Maybe someone in your family was an Antinomian or a Regicide? We can always dream.

[poliphilo]

I know about all my great grandparents apart from one- my grandfather's father; my grandfather never wanted to talk about him so I've come to the conclusion that- since my grandfather grew up in a town on the Thames estuary and his mother kept a "boarding house"- that he was someone off a ship who departed on the next tide. He could therefore have been of any nationality under the sun.

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for sharing this with me.

One thing that going to school with people with long geneaologies taught me was to be prouder of my ancestors than any DAR.