I’ve been captivated by the stories and photos of my family for as long as I can remember. My paternal grandparents called me the ‘family genealogist’ back then, though my interest didn’t fully mature until I got married and began a family.
Suddenly, understanding who my ancestors were and where they came from took on a deeper kind of importance.
What began as a simple search for names and birth dates became a profound exploration of my lineage and of who I am – not only as an individual, but as the result of centuries of lives lived before me.
My formal introduction into genealogy research began much like everyone else’s at the time, with the opening of an Ancestry.com account. Over the last decade, I’ve expanded that research to include genetic testing, hoping to uncover a fuller, more accurate and scientifically informed understanding of my ancestry.
I was also fortunate to receive research compiled by several distant relatives. Their work offered valuable insights, though their genealogical charts could only take me so far, especially since my focus is primarily on direct lineage.
A family bible may have held some of the answers I was searching for, but it was stolen, along with many other personal family effects and heirlooms… Casualties of a complicated family battle after the deaths of my paternal grandparents.
One of the most striking revelations, however, has been the depth of both of my families roots in the United States.
Many of ancestors arrived during colonial times, settling primarily in Virginia and North Carolina. Astonishingly, the majority of my family has largely remained in those regions, with few exceptions.
Equally striking were the discoveries that contradicted family lore.
For example, most of my life I was told we were predominately of German descent, on my paternal side, but DNA revealed a very different story. My strongest paternal ties lie in the Scottish Lowlands, Northeastern England, Cornwall, and Wales.
As I dove deeper into my lineage – my great-grandparents and the greats before them – I began to feel them present in a way I can’t really explain.
What started as research slowly became ritual.
In learning their names, tracing their paths, and sitting with what I’ve managed to piece together, I found myself having deeper conversation with those who came before me. The more I learned, the more reverence I felt for the lives that made mine possible.
Venerating them has become an organic, meaningful part of my daily life, but not every discovery has been easy to process.
Several of my ancestors were slaveowners.
And that realization knocked the breath out of me.
This wasn’t some distant or abstract connection – it was a direct, recorded link to my family’s participation in one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
The weight of this truth grew cloudier as I continued to uncover records of relatives who also fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; One was executed for desertion, another lost in battle.
And I also discovered a relative who did not participate in the original overthrow or annexation of Hawaiʻi, but was a United States appointed territorial governor and part of the American colonial administration of Hawaiʻi.
This knowledge has deepened my understanding of just how complex identity truly is and emphasized that it’s fully my responsibility to work to amend our collective generational sin.
Safeguarding and passing down an honest history of my lineage may be one of the
And I have to because I’m the last one standing.
There’s no one else left to tell the story of us.