Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

conclusion The Reason For,and The Matter Of, Family History

241 C O N C L U S I O N The Reason For, and The Matter of, Family History I begin this conclusion with a three-part confession. First, I plead guilty to having ended this work in a state of ecstasy and exhaustion. I have taken too much of my family into myself and, at least for the time being, depleted my empathy and imagination in recomposing their lives. I have grown weary over anguishing, especially in the case of my parents and grandparents, whether I have divulged too much and yet said too little about their lives. As much as the dead deserve to be remembered, they also merit the cool shade of selective forgetting, rather than the continually glaring light of revelation. There comes a time when to heal I must heed Christ’s advice: even historians must let the dead bury the dead. If we are to meet again, let it be in raiment free of leaden memory and the embroidered mazes of an intricate past. Second, I must confess that I have also used the doors of my family’s past to enter the dwellings of others. Their lives have indulged me in my pursuit of history and humanity itself. Their migrations forged a path tracing my own route to the present and modernity. They gave me a narrative and a philosophy of home. Third, as much as I have tried to make Jacob’s Well a truthful family history , I also admit that it is in some ways an invented story. No family history can be reduced to simply pursuing last names, bloodlines, or most recently, DNA identification; no family, in turn, can be fixed over time in immutable beliefs, ways, and practices. Any family history that spans multiple generations can only be considered as a complex, constantly mutating , and ongoing historical creation. Jacob’s Well 242 In creating Jacob’s Well, I have drawn on the trinity of family history: genealogy ; history, especially local and micro-regional history; and storytelling. Genealogy, which at times seemed a fumbling, clumsy, and expensive craft aimedatcastingscantystick-and-ropebridgesacrosstime,provedabsolutely indispensable. The turn of the microfilm reader, the click of a computer, and the aid of all those amateur and professional genealogists identified a majority of my family’s members. Local history, also commonly ignored and even disdained by some professional historians, introduced me to the land they walked—the landscape and environment they inhabited, their neighbors , institutions, churches, economies, and social circumstances. Stories, the most precious cargo a family carries, were my guiding threads though the labyrinth of time. They individualize and universalize the family past to which I belonged. In so far as Jacob’s Well is the measure, family history is created against the background of obscure origins, in the face of missing evidence, with reference to unfathomable stories and persisting ambiguities. While my family history acknowledges a whole past, it was constructed out of a paucity of information. My questions about roles and changing family relations exceeded my evidence. Genealogy and local history, the best tools I had, proved insufficient. The speculation that rushed in to fill the void did not produce a spine for a narrative or the substance for anything representing certain explanations. Hypotheses and conjectures never compensate for missing facts; generalizations, though they can be subtle and insightful, can stifle a living past in conjecture and rumination. In a family’s past we chew on a cud of memory never to be entirely digested. Borders and boundaries forever need deciphering. The dead, who can be entirely forgotten, often survive only as ghosts of myth and unverified stories. And even the best-known and most documented dead are refracted in the mirror of present views, interests, passions, and sensibilities . The ultimate consolatory appeal of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam forever lies in the belief that the one and great God jealously, lovingly , and unfalteringly listens to human hearts and all the stories of Jacob’s rich progeny. The Reason For, and The Matter Of, Family History 243 Why? Family history teaches what abstractions cannot. It offers wisdom about life that springs like a cat from a pointed story or cunning proverb. Irish poet Michael Coady, in his memoir All Souls, wrote that genealogy “should not be the neat assembly of pedigree culminating smugly in self, but its exact opposite: the extension of the personal beyond the self to encounter the...