Mystery History

Dear Mr. Robinson,

I very much enjoyed your column in this morning's Washington Post titled "The Story I'll Never Know All Of."

As I was researching my genealogy, I found some tantalizing details about people in my family tree that I would have loved to know more about; alas, there seems to be no way to do that. Of my four grandparents, only one had ancestors in this country before 1900, so most of my personal history begins in the early part of last century -- all I know is that people came from Poland, Germany, Ireland. There is no record of what they, as individuals, were fleeing.

The one distinctly American line starts (or ends, if one is trying to go backward) with a girl kidnapped from Scotland at about 13 years old and brought to the States as an indentured servant; I think about her often. She was probably illiterate, had likely lost most of her teeth by my age, if she lived this long -- an undistinguished and indistinguishable life, with the exception of the fact that she had children, and they had children, and so on. My great-great-great-grandfather, part of a regiment from Iowa, died in the Civil War -- of dysentery. I think of him, too: a part of official recorded history only because he had very bad diarrhea. Others of my family were Quakers; not good ones, apparently, which is the only reason there is any record of them -- they kept getting kicked out for marrying the wrong people, and then let back in, and then their children misbehaved, and the Quakers recorded this, too. Of the well-behaved people in that branch of my family tree, there is very little record -- just a name, a year with a question mark after it.

"It's as if a part of me -- a part of us -- will always remain a mystery. DNA tests notwithstanding, no one can give me my history back."

This is true, I think, for the vast majority of us -- because we are living almost at the boundary of recorded history for commoners, when it is, for the first time, almost impossible to lose oneself and one's personal history simply by moving to a new place, whether by force or desire. Maybe it's best that people sink into history and disappear. I think of myself as terribly, terribly interesting, you know? They probably all did. We don't have time for them and their ghosts and the burden of all of their history and our own lives, too.

I think I've missed my own point here; it was only my intention to say that I liked your story, and I identified with it even though I'm not a descendent of slaves -- and now I have to go to work, and carry on with my mostly un-historic life, which will someday probably be summed up by some nosey future genealogist with my name and two dates.

Sincerely...