Several days of rain were the only impact we felt from Hurricane Laura. It kept me out of the yard and garden and so I spent some time in Ancestry.com and in some of the books and notes for which I’m indebted to relatives who spent hours in courthouses, libraries and even parish churches in England.
Much of the time was spent in tracing the descendants of ancestors who are alive today. Like most people interested in genealogy, I like to look for ancestors and see how many generations back I can go. But I also like finding and making contact with fifth cousins and even more distant relations.
One of the first DNA matches I saw when I got my Ancestry test results back was Bud Nelson. Bud and I graduated high school together and I’ve kept up with him through our community theatre and on Facebook. We were both surprised at the match. Turns out we’re seventh cousins once removed. At that level we would have 512 spaces to fill on our family tree chart.
So, what makes our ancestry so interesting? Why should it matter?
I’ve learned that, to some people, it doesn’t.
One of the things that makes doing genealogical research so difficult is when you run into people who just don’t keep up with where they came from. It’s been surprising to me to learn how many people can’t tell you who their grandparents were, much less their great grandparents. They’re focused more on the here and now but you can bet that somewhere down the road one of their grandchildren (or great grandchildren) is going to wish they’d found out and written down grandma’s maiden name.
But, again —
Why Does It Matter?
The artwork at the top of this post is a detail of the 12th century “Tree of Jesse” stained glass window from the cathedral at Chartres, France. There are many depictions of this family tree depicting the ancestors of Jesus inspired by the prophet Isaiah —
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
Isaiah 11:1, NRSV
The “shoot” or “branch” (from the Latin virga) coming out of Jesse of Bethlehem, the father of King David, was understood from a typological standpoint to be a reference to Jesus. Medieval depictions would either show Jesus as the main trunk coming out of Jesse (who was usually depicted as lying down or reclining) or Mary (which allowed the artist to pun on “virga”) with Jesus growing out of her. The “tree” motif allowed the artists to have branches coming off the main trunk depicting the ancestors listed in the genealogies contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
The Jesse Tree in the Lambeth Psalter
By Unknown English Miniaturist (ca. 1140s) - Web Gallery of Art: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15498239
So, the concept of a family “tree” has its “roots” in the Tree of Jesse.
Most of the patrons of the arts in the medieval era were royalty or clergy and the legitimacy of the nobility was important and therefore fostered an interest in the legitimacy of Jesus as the Messiah, the descendant of David.
But why should ancestry matter to us today?
Remember Who You Are
I’m a fan of the Daily Bible Study series by Cokesbury. The entry for August 3rd was a meditation by the author, Stan Purdum, on Jeremiah 2:4-13.
I’ve mentioned before that I was a pretty good kid growing up, not perfect, but pretty good. However, as I reached my teenaged years, my parents, like most every parent of a teenager, sensed greater danger in my life. I had a greater independence and greater ability to get into trouble if I wanted to! With a girlfriend, a job, and a driver’s license, powerful opportunities to mess up lingered on the edges of my life.
Instead of clamping down on me, placing restrictions on me that I probably would have chafed against, my parents showed great wisdom. When I would get ready to leave the sanctuary of our home, they would offer what became a holy commandment: Remember who you are. That’s it. One sentence that was the cumulation of learning how to be the son of Roger and Ruth, the son of an Air Force officer, someone who knew and followed Jesus, even someone who knew how to use his head and not do something foolish.
It worked most of the time, and it especially worked in those times when I could have taken a path that I should not take. For that, I will always be thankful.
Purdum, Stan. Daily Bible Study Summer 2020 . Cokesbury. Kindle Edition (Emphasis added).
In writing about Jeremiah’s condemnation of the people of Judah, Purdum has him in essence saying to them, “Why can’t you remember who you are?”
David Carroll, a retired Elder in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, said the same thing as Purdum when he spoke at his father Bill Carroll’s funeral. His father told him to “remember who you are,” and it stuck with David (and it obviously resonated with me).
When I research my ancestors I want to do more than note names, dates of birth and dates of death. I want to know what they did, what their accomplishments were, how they conducted themselves and were viewed by their neighbors. I want to know how they lived day to day. I want to know them by their reputations and I want to honor them.
That’s why I chose to write about my Confederate Army ancestor Caswell Drake Wicker after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017. That rally was a protest against the removal of Civil War monuments that turned into a racist, anti-semitic rally reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s. My great grandfather, Caswell Drake Wicker, from everything I’ve been able to find out about him, was someone who judged his fellow human beings based on the “content of their character” and not the color of their skin. I have no doubt that he would have been disgusted by the actions of the Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.
In how I view the world today — in how I conduct myself — I remember who I am and that means remembering who my parents are . . . and who our ancestors were.
It also means remembering who I am in relation to my extended family.
That’s why I research not only back into the past but also right up into the present.
I grew up an Air Force brat until I was fifteen. The concept of knowing much about my relatives beyond immediate family was foreign to me. Sure, I knew my mother and father’s families and visited with them. I was very close with my mother’s aunt Catherine Kaneft Meehan (my “Aunt Kack”), but when you’re on the other side of the Atlantic for years at a time, you don’t have a lot of opportunities for getting together.
So, I was especially attentive to stories of extended family and desirous of knowing more about them. That might have been one of the factors that fueled my passion for genealogy.
Having since lived near family in Tupelo for more than forty years, I have developed close ties with my relations in north Mississippi. But with the advent of the internet (or Internet) and online entities like Ancestry.com and Facebook, I’ve expanded my circle of cousins beyond what my forebears could have imagined.
Recently, I made a connection with Scott Nicholson, my sixth cousin 1x removed. We’re descendants of Elder John Parker (1758-1836), who was a veteran of the American War of Independence, a Baptist preacher and one of the first settlers of what became the Republic of Texas. Scott runs a Facebook group for the Parker Reunion with more than 1,200 members — that’s a lot of kinfolk to help me “remember who I am.”
Remember Who You Wish You Were Not
You might be tempted to say, “Wait a minute — what about your ancestors who had a bit of the rascal about them?”
Well, that’s important too.
I have found a few ancestors who got on the “wrong side” of the law, that abandoned their families in dire straits, and even a few that lived dual identities — secret alter egos. That last bit wasn’t uncommon in the days before social security numbers and all the other modern means of keeping track of us. It was easier to “go off the grid” back then.
It puts me in mind of another friend’s family research that resulted in book he wrote titled Fortunate Son: The Story of Baby Boy Francis. If you haven’t read Brooks Eason’s account of his being given up for adoption by his 17 year old socialite mother and being raised by his adoptive parents in Tupelo, then you need to get the book and read it. It’s not only a great tribute to his parents, Paul and Margaret Eason, but a thought-provoking commentary on how society has treated out of wedlock pregnancies in the past and how we are evolving in that regard even today. It is ultimately a book about grace and a celebration of life.
But in discovering the facts surrounding his birth and both his biological and adoptive families (I use the word “discovering” as opposed to “researching” because Brooks didn’t set out to find out anything — events more or less found out him) he learned that the grandfather for whom he was named, who was a highly respected pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Tupelo in the 1930’s, also . . .
Well, you’ll have to buy the book to find out!
The point is that remembering who we are means knowing that we’re not perfect and neither were they. It means acknowledging the need for grace in our lives and in our relationship with our Creator.
One of the things that I love about the Bible is that there are no perfect heroes. Even the best of the characters that populate the “Good Book” are flawed or have acted less than honorably. There’s only one perfect character in Scripture.
Remember Who You Are Not
By Master of Jacques de Besançon - Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1661308
Venerating your ancestors and wanting to live in a way that honors their memory is one thing. Allowing veneration to become something more is something else entirely.
One of the things that would render a person “unclean” under the Mosaic laws was to be defiled by contact with a corpse. It required the most elaborate rituals to restore that person to a state in which they could come into the outer precincts of the Tabernacle and later Temple.
I wonder if this didn’t have to do with the experience of the Hebrew people when living in Egypt — a land where the dead were all but worshiped.
Celebrating your kin — the descendants of your common ancestor was another trap for God’s chosen people. One that could separate them from their Creator as surely as elevating an ancestor to the status of a god. Paul burst that bubble in his letter to the Galatians —
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Remembering “Who You Are” means remembering “Who You Are Not.”
We were created in the image of God, but we are the created, not the Creator.
It is indeed comforting to know that the Creator of the Cosmos emptied out the divine nature and took on the humble mortality of flesh and took a place in humanity’s family tree.
But we need to remember what drove the need that resulted in all those Medieval depictions of the Tree of Jesse. That need resulted from our bent to sinning — to our desire to substitute our judgment of what constitutes good and evil for that which was contained in the essence of that fruit of yet another tree.
So we remember to honor God by remembering that we are not God.
And we honor God by loving God and by attending to the purpose for which we were created.
In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you get a message from me explaining that you are my 15th cousin twice removed.
Shalom.