my story

Tonight I watched Henry Lewis Gates Jr. first installment about well known Americans and their families.

Often this was a family they never really knew.

I watched it twice tonight, and if I get a chance I'll watch it another two or three times and each of the other episodes, if I can.

Our men (now women too) go to war, but wars are so horrible they choose to not tell about their experience, instead living the horrors internally in their remaining years. Those stores go untold and die with them. When our ancestors came from the old country, they often had the same attitude.

One of my great grandfathers came to visit us after I was born. I had a picture of him with my grandmother (his daughter) my mother and me as an infant. Grandpa is holding me and grinning through his huge mustache.

He came out from Nebraska to visit once again when I was 5 or 6. I never met any of the other great grandparents.

One of my sons in law did a lot of work on the family geneiology a few years ago. We have been Americans for 4, 6, 9 generations. One spur he traced back 6 generations, but that person was born in America.

None of this has any meaning except that it raises the same questions in my mind as Dr. Gates was investigating in the families he interviewed. Most of them were 2nd generation Americans.

Where did we come from? What is your family story?

I have a list of names, states and countries (Scotland, Wales, Denmark and perhaps Scotland again). All of those are distant.

So maybe that is why I am going to listen to Yo Yo and Christie and Mehmet and others again and again. Their story is not my story, really, but in a small way it may be.