Taking Time to Honor Heritage

A foreign exchange student friend from Belgium once noted how odd the American custom of national heritage inquiry seemed to her. “Back home,” she relayed, “No one asks ‘What are you?’ If you’re from Belgium, you’re Belgian.” Instead, in the American melting pot and tossed salad of cultures and ethnicities, claiming the country from which one’s ancestors emigrated becomes part of one’s story.

The Upper Great Lakes region became a common landing point for immigrants from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Poland—ethnicities still heavily present in these areas today. It influences our regional foods, décor, holiday traditions, social customs, and more. Our Norwegian-heritage neighbors taught us how to make lefsa years ago, while Mom’s cousin who now lives in Texas always looks forward to stocking up on liverwurst and German-style beers when he visits Wisconsin.

Burrowing down the rabbit hole of one’s own genealogy can be an excellent quarantine endeavor. Some discoveries might help you feel right at home, while others can be curiously surprising.

On my mother’s side, my grandparent’s grandparents came over from Germany in the later 1800’s to escape the draft and turmoil in the Old Country and to have a prospect of owning land. They made such an escape through a late form of the indentured servitude program, where farmers in central Illinois paid for their passage, but the immigrants had to work seven years to pay it back. And the stories go that every last day of hard labor was counted! Afterwards, these young people married and started farms and families of their own, powered by their strong German work ethic. Still today, we josh about doing things the hard way sometimes, otherwise it’s not German enough!

Small wonder, then, that even though those farms were lost (untimely deaths and hardships of the Great Depression played a major role) the grandchildren would be owning and working a sustainably minded, diversified farm once again! Love of the land and its animals runs deep.

The story surrounding the other side of the family felt a bit more murky, in part because of other untimely deaths stressed by the pressures of mental illness and the Great Depression. More recently, a friend hooked me on Ancestry.com and showed me a few ropes before setting me loose to explore. What names, faces, and stories might I find there to unravel the past?

Some were familiar, like my paternal grandmother’s Swedish ancestry landing in Superior, WI to work (and eventually own) the shipyards, with the Normans and the Nelsons being the mainstays in this line. Mom still remembers visits to great Aunts offering the requisite Fika (which they called “coffee and a little something”), usually something sweet and lemony.

The paternal grandfather’s lineage treasure hunt became quite the project, with both Civil War and Revolutionary War veterans, a noted ornithologist, shared grandparents of a famous Dutch architect, a Boston publishing company family, a patriot who hid John Hancock in his house as the British came through town (he was repaid by Sam Adams with the gift of a cow), and proof that the family legend of being a descendent of Robert the Bruce was true. Like a flower opening up, the stories of these people began unfolding—a long line of “how we got to now” that is both so fragile and yet did happen to create the people we see today.

While not every line is traceable (in my own tree there were plenty of dead ends where no records exist), they are all there for each and every one of us. Any subtle change in how events unfolded over time, and I or you or your neighbor wouldn’t have happened. As Norwegian author Jostein Gaardner once wrote “Everyone alive is a winning lottery ticket.”

Part of the joy for me on this genealogy hunt was a feeling of coming home. As countries of origin began adding to the list along with Germany—England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland—there were these little aha moments of why I felt a deep love for Celtic music and enjoyed Kringle and almond extract so much. But the stories also helped bring understanding to why I’d had very visceral experiences when visiting Civil War battlefields or standing in medieval English castle or abbey ruins. Just like the love of the land runs deep, our connection to our ancestors runs deep as well, even when we don’t know their stories yet.

Tagging onto last week’s theme of lifelong learning, as you delve into your family tree, you can take time to learn about the places of your ancestors. What foods would they have eaten or drinks enjoyed? What songs might they have sung or what does the language there sound like? What types of landscapes and histories and folklore would have surrounded them? Find creative ways to bring a little of this into your own home.

As you explore your findings, you can think of the love that was shared across the generations, of the hardships (and plagues and pandemics) endured to create our now. And in this we find that we are not alone in the struggle. What inspiration or comfort can be found in the journey of our ancestors that can help us through our own difficult time?

Time to make some German apple pancakes for breakfast. See you down on the farm sometime.