Good Ancestors Are Hard to Find

As an amateur dabbler in matters of my family tree, I try to keep it fertilized and trim it occasionally when it promises bad fruit or withered limbs. I do hit a snag as to whether certain ancestors might not be kith and kin and would wish I had some choice in picking a more nobler pedigree. Cassius reminded us and his friend that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings”. Stumbling around in our own stash of stardust, we don’t get to choose our ancestors who, over generations, created the likes of us in their images and with their sordid baggage.

As St. Patrick’s Day looms largely on this week’s horizon, I’d like to thank my lucky stars that I have quite a bit of Irish in my DNA. When I hear the sordid stories of how the Irish immigrants were treated upon their arrival to this country in the nineteenth century, I am proud of my great grandmother’s people who came through Canada to arrive in northern Michigan’s copper mining country. And “while the Irish need not apply” might have been the watchword in other parts of this emerging nation, they let my great grandfather be a smelter in the Calumet copper mine near Lake Superior.

From Scotland, another great grandfather set sail to start a new life in Chicago, where he was a tailor of men’s clothing. His son would become a telegrapher for the Illinois Central Railroad and end up in the middle of Mississippi on the main line between Chicago and New Orleans. And that’s where he met my Michigan grandmother to create the family tree containing the Crawford branch. With all these geographical and genetical backgrounds, I feel like I’m a half-breed like Jesus. While the Bible is careful to point out that Joseph was of the “house and lineage of David”, his name was not on the birth certificate.

This would be the proper place to drop some jaw-gaping names from up in those higher branches, but I don’t think that Uncle William [the Conqueror] would want me to give away too many family secrets beyond the Bayeux Tapestry’s story of his overwhelming the Brits at Hastings. So let’s just assume that your people are just like my people; they don’t actually grow on trees like money. They are created in a more loving way and spend their lives procreating their descendants and have to take what they get which happens to be the likes of us.

While I don’t play golf nor wear a kilt, I’ll raise a wee dram on St. Patty’s Day to recall and reclaim my Scotch Irish heritage. At the same time, I need to let the next generation know about their claims to fame just might have more to do with inherited values than the stock from which we came. More about the content of our character than any colors of our skins, like poor little blue blooded Archie.

Maybe it is in our stars after all, or the stardust in us all. We are “carbon” copies of each other and cloned in the spitting image of a Creator who gives us the gift of life itself and simply ask that we try to be the best ancestors in the world for the whole blooming human family. And, as our brother Jesus would put it, color of your skin or country of origin or gender or creed to the contrary not withstanding.