Love Your Roots

We need to be enthusiastic about who we are.  That's one thing that makes us healthy. We need to feel good about ourselves and our backgrounds. The Irish like to think positive about their past ancestors although some have their doubts about history and how it affected them. 

I've written about people who take one of those DNA tests and get the results and are disappointed because they don't believe they are diverse enough. And you see other people on the genealogy TV shows who thought that they are part-American Indian (there must be a lot of people who think this) and they are disappointed when it turns out they are not. Then there was the case of a woman who thought she came from slaves, but found that she came from slave owners on one side of the family who were in fact American Indians.

I often think of people in Mexico who are in many cases both Indian and Spanish.  So in case after case, the genealogy points to both a victim and victimization.

But our background goes much further than a generation or two. And we are survivors. I like to think that if we could see what went on in our past we would find a lot of close calls and courageous behavior. You might have had a horse thief in your family in the 17th century, but then you might have had a hero in the 16th century.  We will never know all that is in our past, even people who have well-researched backgrounds, have only a small portion of their history. Our families go back thousands and thousands of years.

So I encourage people to look positively at their past. In your ancestry, there are likely to be many people who were wonderful and who were survivors.  

Sporting Chance Press is the publisher of Pilgrimage by Patrick McCaskey and The Brown and White by Larry Norris.