Below you will find excerpts from an article about genealogy in "The Age" last
Saturday. I think it is great food for thought
Manasha referred to at the end of the article is one of Colcott's ancestors who
was a refugee from the Polish Pogroms at the end of the 19th century. His life
was continued as a tragic set of events after his migration to Australia, which
culminated in a lonely death.
The full article can be found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/01/1059480559872.html
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
Bruce Colcott, a 39-year-old career public servant, who, propelled by feelings
of loss and guilt, decided to research his family tree. Like the many millions
around the globe, Colcott looked to the past for clues.
This restless hunger for origins is no passing fad. Type "genealogy" into the
Google search engine and you get nearly 10 million hits, making it one of the
world's top 10 hobbies on a list topped by sex and music - a piece of trivia
cited so often it has become a cliché.
Genealogy (a term deriving from the Greek words for "genos", meaning family and
"logos", being knowledge or theory) became a mainstream pursuit in the late
1970s. Despite numerous predictions the mania, first triggered by the
television mini-series of Alex Haley's Roots, would soon ease, it continues to
surge - especially in the US and Australia, two nations founded on mass
migration.
Historians and sociologists reel off the bullet points for what it all means.
They fall into broad categories of postmodern malaise: loss, loneliness and
guilt. Lives are complex, families fragmented. We no longer grow up in the same
village as our forebears or with the aunts and grandmothers who are custodians
of family memory. We marry outside religious and ethnic groupings. Hollywood
packages the past with a watertight plot and syrupy musical score, coating it
in a bland present.
Research in the US shows that interest in genealogy has historically spiked
after large-scale social and political disruption, such as the Civil War and
the Depression. Maybe we are now suspended in permanent rupture.
Ironically, considering this age of therapy and individualism, we seem to feel
as if we know little about ourselves. As if some time in the past something
essential was lost.
Which was how Colcott felt before he started searching.
In genealogy, unremarkable individuals get romanticised as heroes by their
descendants. History has to get personal to be compelling. We look at momentous
events through a solipsistic prism, asking: "Where am I?"
In Australia, this is partly the result of ideological battles that have
damaged historical schol-arship, says Janet McCalman, Melbourne University's
head of history and philosophy of science. Lost in the debate between those,
such as Prime Minister John Howard, who want the study of history to convey a
rousing national story and a left that seeks to critique that story "is an
excitement about learning about the past which is necessary to inspire young
people".
As a result, she says, students until recently were taught the process of
historical inquiry, rather than history itself and, unsurprisingly, it left
them cold.
The personal is powerful even if it is partly delusion. After discovering that
his ancestors were agricultural labourers, a prominent Victorian judge went
quiet for a moment before declaring: "Wouldn't they be proud of me!"
Last year, the National Heritage Foundation took five at-risk teenagers into
Victoria's high country to learn about their ancestry, as part of a project
involving a Utah university. One boy, who excelled at one-liners, learned that
his ancestor had devised the enduring phrase for Cadburys: "A glass-and-a-half
of full-cream dairy milk." Another learnt of MPs in his family tree. Another,
who assumed he would end up in jail like the rest of his clan, learnt of a
minister in his lineage.
All three now appear more ready to clean up their lives and mend bridges with
family - a change they partly ascribe to the knowledge gained.
Perhaps in leaving his family and faith, Manasha left behind too much of
himself and could not be whole again. We will never know. But you feel
sym-pathy for him all the same: the pain, the dashed dreams. His world was just
as complicated and fragmented as our own, the challenges just as great.
Maybe that is the truly comforting part; because when we search our family
histories we are really searching for ourselves. And often that's precisely who
we find.
