Old dead white men (and women)

by chuckofish

Here’s a reminder that knowing your past will guide your future.

“…[W]e are probably the first generation in human history that doesn’t really know the communities from which we come. I can’t name any of my eight great-grandparents. (Perhaps you can, but I would ask, respectfully, what do you know about them?) As Alasdair MacIntyre has famously argued, we speak of justice with verve and passion but are unlikely to know what justice really means or from whom we inherit the very concept. We’re so eager to throw off the shackles of our received traditions that we’ve wholeheartedly loosed our roots from the loyal land and bound ourselves instead to that great banality of modern self-actualization, “you do you.”

I do know the names of my eight great-grandparents, although I admit I don’t know much about my great-grandmother Isabel Stanley Sargent’s line. I only know she was from Maine and that she left her husband and two children and fled to Chicago. She was a shocking skeleton in the family closet, but undoubtedly there was a lot more to that story. I have a fair knowledge of the rest of my great-grandparents compared, I suppose, to my contemporaries.

Since I retired I have had it in the back of my mind to “organize” all the genealogy notes and notebooks I have stored in my office. I tell myself I should write some kind of narrative account of our family. I know from experience researching that there is very little written down out there in the way of personal history and a lot of it is full of mistakes anyway. Nevertheless, anything written down and preserved is good, if not always helpful. I think of my mother’s cousin Jane who wrote “a family history…at the request of her brother” for the “elucidation of our children and grandchildren.” A noble effort it was, which my mother and her sister Susanne tore apart and corrected and generally ridiculed. True, Jane made a few undeserved snarky comments about their mother, but beyond that and the multiple mistakes, it is still a valuable resource (with pictures).

So we shall see if I can get started. Starting is always the hard part.

Meanwhile my grandkids celebrated the 4th in patriotic red-white-and-blue style…

Cuties.

*The ODWM pictured is Joseph Warren Sargent, my great-great grandfather.