Airbrushed Ancestors
By Stephen Carter on Oct 22, 2006
The theme for today’s sacrament meeting was family history. It was better than I had expected. Instead of a run of guilt trips describing our poor ancestors languishing in spiritual prison while we fritter our time away doing hometeaching and member missionary work, going to the temple, laying away our food storage, spending quality time with our families and other unimportant stuff, we were treated to a well crafted story of how the speaker found her ancestors.
She had known exactly 6 pieces of information about her father’s life because even though she was always trying to get information out of him, he would suddenly have to fix the tractor whenever her curiosity started poking its nose around.
From the little she could gather he had lived a sad childhood: abused, abandoned, raised in an orphanage. Nothing worth remembering unless you happen to be Charles Dickens.
Her story followed all the tropes of the genealogical mystery: endless work, little reward, the heart felt prayer, the trip to the family history library in Salt Lake and the miraculous bit of information that opens up the floodgates.
When she found out what her grandmother and grandfather’s name was she was overjoyed. “I finally felt like I had a family,” she said. Since then, she has been slowly turning up more information on her ancestors, including finding out where the ancestral farm is located. She’s going to go visit next summer.
I had a number of reactions to this story. First, I had to agree with her, it’s nice to feel like you’re part of a family. The stories of the different directions my ancestors’ lives have taken give me ways to interpret how my own life seems to be unfolding. My story can be informed by theirs.
But then I start to think about how we tell stories about our ancestors. It seems to me that we talk about them in much the same way we talk about Jesus, we attach to them the ideals we hold dear. We take the things we value and tell about how our ancestors exemplified them. They were brave, they were kind, they were selfless, they crossed the plains with no shoes carrying three sickly oxen living only on roots and herbs they dug up along the way and still made it to the Salt Lake valley before Brigham Young did.
It almost reminds me of a Maxim or Stuff magazine: airbrushed bodies with inflated anatomies and a come hither look. We all know that if we took those bodies out of the page and attempted to live with them, we’d find out that there was a real person with bad breath, mood swings, and a loose way with credit cards to deal with. So we prefer to leave them on the page where we can easily project our fantasies onto them.
Isn’t that kind of what we do with our ancestors? We crave the perfect family mentor, the wise patriarch, the compassionate matriarch, the rich uncle, the literary aunt. And all of them terribly interested in us and our welfare. If we can’t have perfect family relationships in real life, we might as well invent a few.
Ancestral pornography?
It almost seems like we seek out our ancestors as a narcissistic exercise. After all, when we find them the first thing we want to do is take their names to the temple almost as if we’re more interested in making them like ourselves than in finding out whom they really are. I wonder why I’ve never heard a story about an ancestor’s spirit coming to the temple goer and saying, “Hey, thanks for going through all this trouble to get my name to the temple. I appreciate you being so interested, and I’ll look you up when you die, but this Mormonism thing just ain’t my bag.”
Sometimes I imagine the family reunion at the pearly gates. The ones promised to us by family history speakers. You die, rise into heavenly regions and find all who had gone before waiting to greet you. They gather round, hugs are exchanged, tears shed. Then everyone goes to the little buffet Aunt Clara organized (good old Aunt Clara, always thinking of other people). You’re amazed and flattered to see great-great-great grandpa Ebeneezer there who carved out a living from the unforgiving prairies of Iowa, served two 5-year missions and presided over the European mission. He slaps you on the shoulder and congratulates you on a life well lived. As the party progresses, however, he starts to come off as gruff. His dismissive manner of dealing with the women surprises you. He offers you little beyond the initial shoulder slap. In fact, he has an appointment he needs to keep. He’ll see you later.
Eventually the party starts to peter out. Conversation runs thin. The crowd disperses. People have things to do; they have lives to live. You yourself have to go get your papers to see where it is you’ll be living. A few days later Aunt Clara calls, she needs help with some harebrained project or other, just like she did on earth, and she’s going to make you lasso your friends into the project too. And she doesn’t call those stupid dogs off; they’re always jumping on you and sniffing your unmentionables. And great-great-great grandpa Ebeneezer has recommended you for a calling you absolutely hate.
Then the ancestor who didn’t accept the ordinance you did for him invites you out for a beer at Porter’s Pub (Kolob Brewery makes a mean lager). And you have an interesting conversation with him. Maybe you two become bowling buddies at Celestial Lanes.
I’m not trying to knock family history. I think it’s kind of interesting myself. I just had these thoughts today.
Wow. Cool post! Thanks!
Comment # 1 by KF | Oct 22, 2006 | Reply
Maybe you’re right. Have you seen the movie “Hitch”? The main character is a “date doctor” whose ability to charm members of the opposite sex are legendary. He asks a girl on a date, and takes her to Ellis Island. He has done his research and had the security guard find her ancestor in an old log of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. I’m sure Hitch expected his date to respond to her ancestor, just as you described above. As in turns out, the ancestor was a mass-murderer dubbed “The Butcher of Cadiz” and the poor young lady had an emotional breakdown.
I think this just happens when people die. It seems taboo to speak ill of the dead. The father of my step-siblings died when they were all very young, and the way they speak of him, the man could have (and in their minds, perhaps he did) walk on water. It’s interesting, however, that after I enquired about him to those who knew him, it turns out he was a normal guy, who teased, tormented, and riduculed those he didn’t like. More surprisingly is that his wife (my stepmom) apparently thought very little of him, but after his death turned the chap into a demigod.
Comment # 2 by Austin Frost | Oct 22, 2006 | Reply
Maybe I’m an unusual guy (watch those responsive comments!!), but I enjoy the “skeletons” in my ancestors’ closets. It interests me to learn that two distant cousins owned a tavern where visitors with money seemed to “disappear.” I’m fascinated to learn about the great-great-great-aunt who, in a fit of depression and rage, committed suicide by leaping from an upper-story hotel room window—and dragged her mother (my direct line) along for the unfortunate ride. Then there’s my great-great-grandfather, the Polish immigrant who tried to break up a street fight, only to get a knife plunged into his head, causing his death a few days later.
Now, I’ve just made it sound like I have the most disfunctional family history in the world, but of course I’m picking out the more bizarre stories for emphasis. These stories, along with the less dramatic ones, are simply human experience. The stories tell me that those who went before me lived life, with all its challenges, triumphs, and yes, failures. They tell me that I’m part of a very long, very complicated story of humanity.
Several here are aware that I am no longer a member of the LDS church. While in the church, however, I was rather avid in family history and temple work. While I may have somewhat mixed feelings today about the few thousand relations I had work performed for, I can’t begin to overstate the personal value of “meeting” my ancestors. I think family history gives us a perspective that simply isn’t possible in any other way.
Comment # 3 by Nick Literski | Oct 23, 2006 | Reply
My grandfather recently passed away at the age of 94. Five or six years ago he self-published his autobiography, Long Trail Winding: The Personal History of Morris Alma Thurston. My grandfather was a devout Mormon who served two missions and worked in the Los Angeles Temple for the last 25 years of his life. While his autobiography contains some reflections on various periods of self-doubt about his personal or scholarly abilities, family, or career, the sole mention of any human frailty (something LDS might call “sin”) in the nearly 400 pages is the following sentance: “The winter of 1930-31 was one of much idleness and I developed some poor habits.”
As such, no other sentance elicited more curiosity, at least for me. What habits? And how did he overcome them? I asked my dad, who edited Grandpa’s biography, if he was privy to additional details. He admitted his own curiosity, but admitted that he didn’t press his father for details. Never did I feel any sense of judgment for his supposed lapses, only love, compassion, understanding and kinship. His was the WW2 generation, and unlike my Generation X, I’m inclined to think that “naval gazing” was not one of their collective personality quirks. In fact, some of his stoic contemporaries might question his decision to include the admission of idleness and poor habits. I’m not suggesting he (or anyone) should air their dirty laundry in their journals or memoirs. Such decisions are personal and dependent on a variety of factors. Whatever the case, I’m grateful for his one-sentance admission, as that sentance, maybe more than any other, helped me relate to my grandfather as a fellow human traveller.
Comment # 4 by Matt Thurston | Oct 23, 2006 | Reply
I’m glad you guys are opening closet doors.
Three years ago my brother in Salt Lake got a strange email from a Rochelle in Southern California who was exploring the Internet in behalf of her friend Dorothy who was looking for information abut her father. Dorothy had been obsessing about at least finding his grave site for the past several years. Rochelle wrote that she had found our surname which matched this woman’s father’s and would we be related to a Nicholas Kovalenko who came from Russia to Boston in the early 1920s. That peaked my brother’s interest, since that squared with our father’s history. Still, the name Kovalenko was a common name in Ukraine and Russia (it means Smith), so my brother cautiously made the woman aware of this fact.
When Rochelle came back to say that the Kovalenko she was looking for had also changed his name to Kregg after coming to this country, there could be no doubt that this was our father! “Kregg” was a concocted name and was the name we had been born with, as had Dorothy. My brother and I then were informed that we had an older sister whom we had known nothing about! Therein lies a tale and a new family. We then discovered that we had four grown nephews, one of which I brought to the Sunstone Symposiuim this past summer. On closer inspection of our dad’s records and notes, we discovered mention of Dorothy and her mother, but until Rochelle’s call we had not been able to figure out who they were and why Dad had mentioned them. Now we knew, and our family tree grew a few feet overnight.
Comment # 5 by Zhenya | Oct 29, 2006 | Reply
I just read an interesting review of a new documentary called “51 Birch Street” over at rogerebert.com. The movie reminds me a little of this post.
Here is a quote from his review:
Every family has its stories, the ones they tell and the ones they don’t. Some are repeated regularly at clan gatherings until they assume the shape of myth. Certain details are amplified or embellished, while others fall away with disuse, but with time the contours of the stories themselves achieve a well-worn solidity. They, along with the unspoken assumptions that support them, become the official version of the family’s history. They give everybody a sense of where they fit in the narrative structure, and they help us forget about the other stories that are stashed unacknowledged in the closets or the cellar or in the gaps between the walls.
Here is the full review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061102/REVIEWS/611020301
Comment # 6 by Matt Thurston | Nov 3, 2006 | Reply
Excellent article!
I know I’m a little slow on reading, but I’m going to post it on the website I included.
Excellent!
Comment # 7 by Becky | Oct 6, 2008 | Reply