Conflicted: A July 4th treatise on family history

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Conflict

Lying at the very heart of the genealogical enterprise is a conflict I try hard to avoid, but with difficulty. When I uncover another generation of my forebears, when I tread on the land or visit a grave of my ancestors, there is a very special claim to belonging, to some kind of ownership, to specialness. And if one is not careful, to a degree of exceptionalism. These are ‘my people’ therefore, in some peculiar way, special. Yet this feeling, this claim is really quite specious.

I know nothing about these people as individuals. I don’t know whether they were upstanding members of their communities or social isolates. I don’t know whether they were good and noble, or depraved and vicious; whether they beat their wives or children or were kindly and nurturing both to their own kin and to others outside their own circles. Nor does this feeling of connection and specialness limit itself to the individuals and families, but can extend to entire societies.

Exceptionalism, as defined in Wikipedia,

is the perception or belief that a species, country, society, institution, movement, individual, or time period is "exceptional" (i.e., unusual or extraordinary).

The term carries the implication, whether or not specified, that the referent is superior in some way.  Though the idea appears to have developed with respect to an era, today it is particularly applied with respect to particular nations or regions. 

So while I love to trace my ancestors, to establish this link to people from whom I am descended, and while some part of this overflows into a heightened interest in the society in which they lived, I need a space in which to acknowledge the limits of my understanding of these people and avoid endowing them with virtues, value above and beyond that of every other human being who has ever walked the planet.  

So, like any good citizen on July 4th, I remind myself of the noble if not yet fully implemented words of the Constitution: all “people” are created equal.