Roots

The other day I was talking with a friend when the subject turned to our ancestry. It reminded me of the very first article I wrote for the local newspaper. For whatever reason I never shared it here on my blog, so I thought I'd do so now. 

 

Roots

The other day I was looking over some of my family's ancestral and genealogical records. On my mother's side I can trace my bloodline back to William Bradford, one of the pilgrims who sailed to the new world on the Mayflower. He's my 13^th Great-Grandfather. Then there's some connection to Samuel Huntington, who was a prominent political figure during the American Revolution, and John Perkins, who's daughter, Mary Bradbury, was falsely accused of being a witch. On my father's side people like Max Detweiler (“Uncle Max” from Sound of Music) and William Jennings Bryan have their place in the family tree. There's even a Row family crest and a castle in England somewhere. The intriguing findings never cease. My family history is not unique. Most everyone can find some famous or infamous person in their history.

Yet, what amazes me the most is how we all managed to wind up in the Eau Claire area by some means or another. It is incredible to think of the seas crossed, the journeys embarked upon, trials faced and the roads taken that brought each of us here to this peaceful country.

I have a friend who was born in Central America and moved to the United States to study at UWEC. Now a successful businessman and world-traveler, he once told me that the Midwest, specifically this region, is inhabited by the kindest, most easy-going people he's come across.

Malcom Gladwell wrote of the people who settled in the Appalachian region in his book Outliers, “...when they immigrated to North America, they moved into the American interior, to remote, lawless, rocky, and marginally fertile places like Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World.”

Here in the Eau Claire area there's been a lot of expansion and growth since it was founded. Even in the last decade we have larger communities, bigger buildings, greater technological advances... an over all growth of the commonwealth. It is a sort of boom in relations and communication similar to when one switches from dial-up to high-speed internet... or from a land-line to smart phone. The kind of boom that produces instant development in so many areas of life.

Still, the people remain essentially the same as the people groups and regions they came from.

This is no coincidence or miracle. Often it is the deliberate decision of passing on our values to the next generation. What our grandparents passed on to our parents who passed it on to us... who in turn pass it on to our children... and so-on. Then again, it is also a sort of inherited code of conduct, patterns of speech, general temperament that we receive unwittingly from our relations and our community that haven't changed in hundreds of years.

Malcolm Gladwell determined that, “Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.”

Many of our ancestors moved to an unfamiliar land to defend their rights and keep their freedoms. We live in a place where we can carry on the same values that our predecessors fought to maintain.

In this community we share a strong moral standard; a great sense of goodwill toward our neighbors. We wave and smile at the strangers we pass by and though most of us probably don't have a family crest each of us have the right to a 'castle' and the freedom to defend our homes, ideals and the people and things we hold dear.

In the course of a lifetime it may not be life-changing to know who our ancestors were and one might surmise that looking to the past renders little good. Yet, evidence shows that looking back we can see where we came from to better understand where and who we are now. Though here in the Chippewa Valley area we may not have the heritage of a Southern town or the revolutionary roots of the Eastern states, we live in a quiet, kind land... and it takes a kind people to inhabit a kind land.