How to Face Your Ancestors' Choices Even When It's Hard

All of your ancestors were perfect, right? Unfortunately, everyone has ancestors who disappoint us with their choices.

In this episode, I talk about four ways we respond when we discover an ancestor made choices that hurt others.

As we learn to be more open to putting our ancestors' choices into the context of their lives we can see them as real people, living with the effects of their environment, the choices of their family members and others around them, as well as their own choices.

An added bonus is that as we learn the skill of being observant of our ancestors, we can also use that skill in our interactions here and now.

Are we connected on Instagram or Facebook yet? Find me @msheathermurphy

Transcript

How to Face Your Ancestors' Choices Even When Its Hard

Heather Murphy: Hello, and thank you for joining me for today's discussion. Now, the last episode, I talked to Annie Hartnett and we talked about some heavy things about how she was handling the idea that her and ancestors, people that she was related to, thought it was okay to own and mistreat other people.

So today I'd like to talk about the different choices we have when we come up against those things in our family tree. Because nobody's family tree is perfect. You will find people in your family tree that did something that you don't agree with, that you may even have guilt or shame around, and we need to address that or work through that.

Now, part of the problem is our historically view of genealogy. That genealogy has historically been about building ourselves up by linking ourselves to people of importance or that did good things. Because in our minds we think that if we are connected to someone who was successful or accomplished great things, or was just this amazing person, that that means that we are those things too. I mean that's why sites like Family Search have, or through Roots Tech has an option where you can see how you're related to certain celebrities. And so when it pops up and says, you're related to this inspirational, famous person, you get this hit of dopamine, cuz you're like, "yes, that's me!"

But it doesn't even matter that the only connection you have is someone that lived 300 years ago, and really your experiences and the generations that led up to you have completely different experiences. We like that feeling of connectedness to greatness. 

But then what happens when we find these people in our family tree who are the opposite of that, who have done bad things to their family or to other groups of people or community at large. Then we're left with negative feelings of, well, what does that mean for me? How am I less than I thought I would, or do I inherit some of those bad choices in the same way, I expect that I inherit greatness from these other people?

Now, several of my guests have these situations come up. There was Gabrielle Robinson who discovered that her beloved Opa, her grandfather that helped raise her, actually had belonged to the Nazi party. And then we have several people who have had to deal with people being enslavers. And then you have things like abuse, committing crimes, alcoholism, deserting families, all these things that are really negative that we react to. And even when we don't know them, they are part of our family's story and have an impact on our family culture, on the way we were raised to see the world. So it's important to address these situations when they come up, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. 

From my experience though, there are four ways that people can react or respond when they come across these negative situations. Those are ignore, justify, judge and observe. And let's go through these.

So sometimes the response is to ignore what happened, to sweep it up under the rug, to just pretend you never found it, to sometimes not even tell anybody that you made that discovery. That's what Gabrielle did when she found that journal of her grandfather's and made that discovery, she put that journal back on the shelf and she didn't tell anyone.

 Sometimes the best initial response actually is to ignore it. Maybe you're not in the place where you are ready to face that. It can be triggering and you've got other things going on in your life and it's just not the time, and that's okay. 

And then there's sometimes where it's not significant in the moment for you to address. But at some point it's going to come up and you're going to have the opportunity to address it. If it starts popping up and you keep smooshing it to the back of your head, you're never going to be able to resolve it. It's weighing you down even if you're trying to ignore it. Just because you're ignoring it doesn't mean that it didn't happen and that it is not affecting you.

 The truth is our past affects us way more than we realize, and not just only our past and our choices, but the choices of our ancestors. It's through bringing those stories to light, to finding out as much of the truth as we can, that we can start finding healing within ourselves and with our families.

Oftentimes, ignorance is not bliss, even though we would like it to be, so There are two ways that addressing these things, of stopping ignoring them, can help us. And the first one is personal peace. When that thing keeps coming up to your mind and you keep ignoring it, but it keeps coming up, why not just face it? That's what happened to Gabrielle. She kept having things happen, and finally she just blurted it all out to her husband and they agreed that it was time to learn more about the situation, time to face it instead of ignoring it. 

The other opportunity is, if you learn more about that situation, if you look at it and stop ignoring it, that you would be able to use that knowledge to improve something. You could improve your life because you recognize that that event caused a cascade of effects throughout the generations, and now that you know that you can do something about it. You can use it to help you understand society and help you see the microcosm of history through your family, and then you can understand the greater history of the place where you live. Because of that view through your family history, you can understand things differently by using that knowledge that you learn from facing that hard thing. 

Now, the second option is to justify. So our brains are wired to keep us safe. Ignoring it is one of the ways that our brain keeps us safe. It says, Nope, we're not handling that right now. We're putting it away. Another way is to justify because we feel attacked or threatened or our brain doesn't want us to feel any negative feelings that it doesn't have to, and so we justify.

" Well, things were different back then." "It's just the way it was." " They weren't the only ones that were doing that". "It wasn't that bad." "That group of people did this to the other people." Any way you can explain away that what happened in the past wasn't that bad. Or that they were just a victim of their circumstances, even if you don't know all of their circumstances, because we don't want to be associated with someone who did something wrong.

And so it preserves us by justifying that person's action. Because if we can make it seem that they weren't so bad, then we don't have to worry about inheriting that negative aspect, or being connected to somebody, a relative, that did something that wasn't helpful to family or society. 

The third thing that we can do is judge. Oftentimes judge a person by an event without knowing their life. You don't know everything about your ancestors. You can look at all the historical records that you can possibly come up, and unless you have a journal that covers their entire lifespan and all of their thoughts and feelings and decision making, you can't know who that person was and their evolution through life. 

And we see that today when somebody pulls up a video that somebody made 20 or 30 years ago where they did something that wasn't the best choice, that did hurt somebody in some way, and yet then we say, well, that person did this 30 years ago, they shouldn't be in public office now. We don't allow for change. We assume that our ancestor did this at this certain point in time. That makes him a bad person. Well, do you have any idea if your ancestor who made those choices, regretted them later in life and tried to not live that way, tried to make it better in some way? In the religious termin terminology, repented of what choices they had made.

Oftentimes we don't get to see that. So we see our ancestor who was an enslaver and we say, oh wow, they were bad. But do we judge them for their whole life? We can't because we don't know everything.

And that leads to the last one, which is observe. This is a way to look at your ancestors and be curious. Sure, they did those things, but what was their whole life like? And you look at their life not in a way to justify or to judge or not looking for evidence that they were a good or a bad person.

You're looking for understanding, you're looking for context. You're trying to get the broader picture. Not only of their lives and the choices that they made, but also the broader context of how do their choices affect other people, for good or for bad? And then that can give us added perspective. That allows us to look at a whole person and maybe judge less because we can see everything. Not everything, but as much as we can, more than we would if we would've just judged them or justified them and not looked for more information.

 Observing is an opportunity to remove ourselves from ignorance, justification, and judgment, and instead look at gathering information for perspective. Get to know your ancestor. Sit down with them. Think about their lives and their context and their family members and what was going on. What might it have been like to be them? That's why I don't research for people anymore. I'll do the research, but I will not put together their tree for them because if I do, they don't have the time to sit with their ancestors and think about them, to allow your mind to explore the possibilities. 

And the very interesting thing that happens when you do this is that then that transfers into the here and now. So when you see a family member do something that is hurtful, or a friend or a coworker or somebody you don't even know, you can say, I wonder what his story is. I wonder what she is going through at that time and place, or what has led to her at that time and place to make her act or say that thing in this time. 

When we practice observing our ancestors, we actually practice being more open to seeing things differently and not making so many judgments and justifications in our lives to keep us safe. I'm fascinated by how we can train ourselves to look at our ancestors' lives and how we can use those skills in our lives with the people around us. 

I'd like to tell you the story of Edward Francis Murphy. He is the brother of my husband's third great grandfather, and in 1899, he was the first person in King County Washington, which is where Seattle is to ,have the court take away his custodial rights of his children for neglect. I could have looked at that newspaper article and then the court documents and seen how he had four children under the age of 14, and they were living in great neglect. They weren't going to school. They were stealing and begging for food. Their living conditions were filthy. And he was an alcoholic. So I see him and I think, wow, you have to be pretty, not okay to have your children taken away from you. But then I decided to learn more about him and the context of his life. 

He was born in 1843 in Dublin, the third child of his parents. Now, this is the era of the potato famine. Things were not going well in Ireland. Around the age of six to nine years old, his father dies, and sometime between eight and nine, he and his, at least his mother. I don't know if his father was still alive then or not, and five of his six siblings leave Dublin and go to Quebec, Canada. His mother remarries when he is nine years old, to a man that's 35 years older and they start having more children right away. 

So how would it be to be nine years old to leave the country, your father is dead, your mother re marries. Everything's different. How would that be for him? By age 19, he goes down across the border into Vermont and joins the Vermont Infantry in June of 1862 for the Civil War. At one point he's captured as a prisoner of war, but then released the same day, it was one of those situations, and then was sent up to Camp Douglas in Chicago where he contracted tuberculosis and was discharged with a full medical total disability less than a year after he enlisted. He had medical problems the rest of his life because of that. 

Eventually, 10 years later, so when he is almost 30, he gets married in Quebec from a woman that was from Vermont and they head to Virginia City, Nevada, where silver is super hot and it is booming in the mid 1870s. A great place to go if you're looking for work and looking to improve your situation in life. 

In August of that year, they have their first child born, but less than two months later was the Great Fire of 1875, where 75% of Virginia City burned to the ground. It started at five o'clock in the morning and you had to get what you could and get out and keep moving across the city as the fire spread. I know for sure that his marriage certificate burned in that fire, and if that burned, then I'm sure the majority of their belongings burned as well. Another setback for him. 

I don't know how long they stayed there after that, but within four years, they were in the Portland, Oregon area. They had several more children there. Moved up to the Seattle area in Washington, moved around a little bit, and then settled in Seattle.

 He worked labor jobs. They lived in the poor parts of town and at 40 years old, his wife died of blood poisoning. They had three children under the age of five at that point. His oldest daughter was going through her own divorce and custody proceedings that were quite the sideshow.

Life wasn't going very well for him.

And then three years later is when King County passed the law enabling the county government to take away custody from parents and a person in their neighborhood reported him right away for the two youngest boys and my assumption is that the two youngest girls were already in a home because they were in a home a year after that, and for some reason were not named in this custody hearing. 

He's had a rough life, that doesn't justify the way that he treated his children. I tried to refrain judging him for that because I don't know him. I have historical records about him, and I've tried to collect as much as I can about him. But I don't know him. I don't know who he would've been if his dad had not have died when he was nine or younger. I don't know who he would've been if he hadn't of, hadn't experienced immigrating at that young age. I don't know how he was treated by his stepfather.

 I can refrain from judgment and I can observe and I can see all these pieces that contributed to him not being able to take care of his children.

Now I wanna add that there was one documented bright spot in his life. In 1907 he's pretty sick by now. He dies the next year, actually. But there's a newspaper article that says "Murphy Brothers United At Last." 

One of his brothers that had lived in Quebec had heard somehow that Edward was in Seattle. So John went to Seattle, he went to the police station and inquired about his brother to see if he might be able to find out where he lived. He walks out of the police station, starts going down the street, and he sees somebody he might recognize. Now remember, Edward left Canada in 1875, so it's been more than 35 years since they've seen each other. John goes up to the man and asks him if he might be Edward Murphy, and it was, and they had this great reunion. It's kind of nice to see a bright spot in his life when everything else was so hard That's one of the gifts that we get when we take the time to observe our ancestors. 

And then we can choose what we want to do with that information going forward. How are we going to use it? Is it going to change our perception of our family values, of maybe the way we express our family values? Is it going to change how we see history and the implications of choices made generations before? Is it going to help us have connections with people we didn't think that we had anything in common with?

The other part of finding out these things that goes right along everything is the feelings that we have, and you have to honor them. If you're not ready to pass that ignore stage, then wait until you are. And if you need to move through it, move through it in a way that feels good to you, maybe not good, but not hurtful to you. Maybe you need a therapist. Maybe you need a sounding board as a friend. But it's going to benefit you to work through these hard things. 

The goal of each generation is to improve their lives compared to the previous generation and to set up the next generation to be even better than they were.

But if we separate ourselves from the truths of the past we can't learn from them. If we jump to judgment or justification, we can't learn the lessons that are within that story. The key to releasing ourselves from the bondage of the past is by seeking the truth and then using that truth to improve ourselves and the world in which we live.

We have the opportunity to learn from the past, but only if we are open to the lessons that it has to teach for us. And the lessons it teaches you may be different than the lesson it teaches your parent or your sibling or someone else who has the same ancestor because we are all different. 

So the next time you come up against something hard in your family tree, decide if your response is ignoring it, justifying it, judging it, or observing it, and see how that can help you work through those things and use them for good in your life.

I, I'd love to hear your experiences and the hard things that you've come up against and how you've worked through them. I'd love to get your emails, your dms about this.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you next time.