Genealogy and Female Ancestors
Digging up your family roots. Trying to find the baron which old family stories tell about. That kind of stuff.
I’ve been doing some looking up for a friend, and what strikes me most about the whole adventure is how it truly is HIS story. Women disappear into the mists of time.
As it happens I’ve just finished packing for a trip to Brooklyn, N.Y., to look up information on some of my ancestors. (I hadn’t really realized I had any from Brooklyn in my at all!)
Anyway, I’ll be leaving from my mom’s, and she gave me a little memoir written by a great-great aunt about her childhood, young adulthood, career, and retirement at Vassar. Her father, my great-great grandfather, was the founding president of the college and she was raised there, went to school there herself, and later worked there from hear early 60s till she passed away.
Anyway, Chapter 3 begins “My mother belonged to the days when a wife didn’t feel the need of a ‘career’ or expect to ‘live her own life’ apart from that of her husband, and her only ambition was to be known as the wife of John Raymond. ... Truly in a way she did not mean she was no ordinary woman; and because her life will never appear in a page of American biography, and because she had in herself a richness of character and a charm that was recognized by her many friends, I am glad to contribute a few of my memories of her to be read by some of the earlier Vassar students who may still remember her gracious hospitality.” The memoir was published in 1940.
Perhaps because of the connection to Vassar what has been handed down about our family tree has about as much biographical information about the women as the men. Which would be not much at all for the most part.
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One quibble very minor quibble. While making the very good point to a commentor that even though women quickly disappear from the records they nevertheless continued to exist Echidne said “Also because the number of one’s ancestors increases really rapidly as one goes backwards in general…”
Something I’ve learned is that, at least in America but probably everywhere, if you trace your ancestors enough generations your ancestors begin to overlap. It’s kind of wild how many seemingly unrelated people can have the same great-great or great-great-great grandparents. One intermarriage and boom, a whole quadrant of anticipated ancestors will already have been recorded elsewhere.
One last thing I’ve learned, grimly, is that so many women may be relatively unknown because they so frequently died young. And then their widower husbands remarried. Sometimes more than once! The upshot being that very often the women we do know more about are those who lived long enough, or had few enough children, to be remembered. What’s been hardest so far is coming across letters from parents and sometimes husbands remembering with aching longing the brightness and brilliance of the daughters or wives who passed away before they ever should have.
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I don’t think I’ll have time this trip to go up Vassar. But next time, next fall I hope, I will.
Random commentary – At
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Wed, 2010-06-09 17:21.Random commentary –
At some point, one’s ancestors become at least half of the people who were alive at the time. (The other half left few to no descendants.) I wonder roughly how many generations ago that was? Or even, how far back on the average you go before finding that many of your ancestors were siblings? Not with each other, I mean, but through entirely different family lines.
On my mother’s side of the family, the family history pretty much ends with my grandparents. Not because they literally popped out of nowhere, but because both of them were orphaned at a very young age and never really knew their biological parents. Neither of them felt very strong ties to their adoptive families. They were even at the same orphanage, though not at the same time. While it’s probably still possible to trace their ancestry, there’s no meaningful history on that side. (My father’s side of the family, on the other hand, has a lot of history going all the way back to the Mayflower, including male ancestors who played significant parts in the American Revolution and Civil War. Too bad that this branch of it may end up dying out in my generation.)
Also I wonder how many family trees are unknowingly screwed up because all the records say that someone was so-and-so’s child, but they actually weren’t, at least in a purely biological sense. (Because some baby was “given away” out of family shame, the wife cheated and wasn’t caught, a baby was kidnapped, etc.) And how much does that really matter?
It’s now possible to create bacteria whose only ancestor is a computer – by assembling them out of raw data and proteins. If there ever comes a day where people do this with humans, even if only rarely – do the people who raised them count as a “biological parent”, or does their family tree literally end with themselves?
In my family history the most
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Wed, 2010-06-09 20:50.In my family history the most interesting characters are predominantly female. (Although I can’t claim the sort of illustrious ancestors you can Figleaf, there are quite a lot of colorful characters of both sexes and interesting stories.) Perhaps the most historically interesting ancestor I know of is my matrilineal great grandmother. In fact, she’s the only immigrant I’m derived from who came to America (or at least left Ireland) willingly. The rest were effectively evicted from their native land by famine, landlords, loansharks, and the British Empire.
Basically she was born almost exactly to the day 100 years before I was born. And at the age of 15, she came to America entirely on her own. She had been a schoolmaster’s assistant in County Roscommon, Ireland. But her brother was about to get married so they wanted to get her out of the house. The plan became to marry her off to a man seven years older than her father who had a mess of kids from multiple deceased wives, that the old man wanted her to take care of. She apparently took one look at that and said, “No thanks!”. So she packed up all money that she managed to save from her job and some items she could sell, left in the middle of the night leaving a note, walked and hitchhiked to Galway, and opted for a ticket to Boston over New York, for reasons of the ticket price. She never wrote to her parents for 15 years, and never saw them again. After many years as a governess she married at 38 and had five children.
Also her line is one part of the family that can be traced back to the 18th century and beyond (something that’s not much easier to do with refugees of the Great Famine, than it is with African American slaves), and has another cool thing that I’d tell you if you contact me off-line, because I don’t want to advertise this too much because it could seem cheap. But one interesting thing about her family is that her parents had signed their marks when they were married, because they couldn’t write their names. Another is that the documents were in Irish and English despite this being at the nadir of British colonialism. The man she was married was mostly remembered by the family for fermenting bathtub booze as an old man during prohibition.
She was a pretty interesting character for several reasons including a women’s history point of view, no?
I’m honored to have her mitochondrial DNA.
There was a bit of family
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Wed, 2010-06-09 21:48.There was a bit of family history on my father’s side where two lines of ancestors traced their families back to “great-grandmother Elizabeth” or something like that.
Turns out that the relevant Elizabeth in both cases was the delightfully scandalous Elizabeth Fones.