Gaps in the Tree
Ancestors missing from the records, and reconnecting with them.
A Few Notes: Read to the end of the article for ideas to help you connect with and honor your missing ancestors. My recommended book of the month, a memoir about shamans and ancestors, is also at the end.
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Seeking Ancestors
In branching out, it narrows. Mirrors reflecting back the same story over and over, so much so it’s laughable. What everyone in the family said seems to be true. German and Polish. Mostly farmers. The whole lot of them on both sides of my family, came to Wisconsin between 1845-1895. Some were Catholic. Many were Lutheran.
This confirmation of the obvious only further inflames my desire to find something unique. Quickly, I realize that what has meaning is what is missing.
Patterns of emptiness emerge to tell a shadow story. I note my grandma’s entry on a 1940 census. Zero hours worked for zero weeks of the year. My grandpa? He’s recorded as working seventy hours in the week prior to the census and 52 weeks in the previous year. They ran a dairy farm. I know she worked just as hard as him. She canned, gardened, cooked from scratch, cleaned, did laundry, raised the kids, and tended the animals.
Zero hours worked. Heavens. I want to rage at the madness of it. If I didn’t know her and the stories about her, I might believe the records. What a way to honor the ancestors.
As weeks of research roll by, punctuated by a few late nights, I find two branches of my family tree that likely trace back 400-500 years in Germany. Brief moments of excitement arise when ancestors pop up in Poland and when one appears in Bern, Switzerland. The delight dies out.
It’s time to admit the folly of my search. I have to be honest with myself. I want to find more. Where are the healers in my heritage, the herbalists, shamans, alchemists, storytellers, and wise women? I should have known better than to look here, in the record books.
The ancestors I seek were information nomads. They carried their histories with them rather than trusted them to institutions and paper. The ancestors I seek were women whose surnames weren’t passed down. They were women who lived in societies that didn’t believe their work was worth recording. These were the ancestors who lacked wealth and social standing.