I’ve just
finished this book, The Juggler’s
Children. It has certainly got the
genealogist in me stirred up, wanting to get researching once again. The book gets its name from the author’s
pursuit of information on her paternal great-grandfather, apparently a Chinese
juggler. Although this one man gets her
started, she also ends up pursuing family ties in India, England and Jamaica as
well. Once research gets rolling, it can
literally lead you anywhere—how much more exciting does research get?
The author,
Carolyn Abraham, is a science writer who details her experience into personal
genetic research combined with old fashioned interviewing of family and
potential family as well as searching the paper and ink records. One of my friends asked me years ago to
participate in National Geographic’s genetic project, but for some reason I was
not at all interested at the time. I may
have to re-visit that decision in light of this book. After all, we have some rumours of North
American Indian blood in the family and there is one man in our Danish line of
ancestry whose name whispers “Russian” to me.
Perhaps we do have mysteries that we can tango with through DNA.
I was
particularly struck by one passage in the book:
“I asked Adrian why he thought so many people—people who
might never have spent a minute researching their ancestry—felt suddenly
compelled to find genetic relatives.
‘We’re lonely,’ he said flatly. ‘Families are so fractured, and we’re
all caught up in this rat race and in the process we kind of lost our
identities. I’d much rather talk to a
cousin I never knew I had than to a complete stranger. We don’t want to be so lonely anymore.’”
Shades of Kurt Vonnegut and his book
Slapstick, where everyone is to be assigned a middle name: a random natural
object and a random number. Anyone who
shares your object is a cousin and anyone who shares the object and number is a
sibling. Thus community is created. Lonesome no more!
I have spent
time tracking down distant cousins. I
have cold-called complete strangers with the “right” surname in ancestral
areas. I remember having tea and muffins
in Moncton with a very lonely elderly woman, who gratefully shared all the
family information that she knew in exchange for an afternoon visit. I’ve prowled cemeteries in New Brunswick with
various shirt-tail relatives, looking for the gravestone of a missing
great-grandfather (we found it because a distant cousin was dating the grounds
keeper of the cemetery and he consulted the plot plan for us). En route to another cemetery, I was assured
by a many-times-distant cousin that “the land owner knows my car and so he
won’t shoot.” I’ve been given privileged
access in an archive on the say-so of a distant cousin. The bond forms quickly.
Genealogy is
addictive—it is mysterious, as you use family legends as a starting point to
discover the paper trail. You are always
open to hearing another family story and following up any clues you may divine
from it. You plan your vacations around
visits to archives, libraries and burial grounds. Facts are assembled, compared, analyzed, all
in an attempt to figure out where to look next.
And the stories are fascinating. The
people, by and large, are warm and welcoming.
We really do like to talk to “cousins we never knew we had.” It’s fun to share stories and figure where
the intersections are and if we are very similar or quite different and yet
still Family.
The other
things that strikes me about this genetic research is the extent to which we
all share genetic material. No one is
“pure” anything. It truly proves that
racism is just chasing your own tail—completely pointless. I read in one genealogy text that if you go
back 30 generations, we should each have millions of ancestors. But there weren’t that many people in all of
Europe back then, so if you have European ancestors, you are not only related
to royalty, but you are also connected to every swineherd.
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