This is the best way, in my view, to create a family archive:

Each person connected to the family by marriage, birth, or adoption reports, in their own words, the salient facts about themselves and the life they have lived: where they were born, educated, worked, and resided. Here’s a simple way to do this.

In addition to this bare-bones, résumé-style autobiographical statement, each contributor would ideally add something more personal, for which there is no standard template or format. It could be just a few words about their hopes and aspirations; their friendships and relationships with other members of the family; their philosophy of life, lessons learned, and opinion about the times they are living through; maybe even their disappointments and pain. They might explain simply why they made certain key decisions or what they thought of the main events of their life. Anything that helps communicate who they are.

If they supplement this rich first-hand account with a few judiciously selected photographs and pertinent documents, the combined result would be an extraordinary record of a family.

That, as I say, would be perfect. It rarely happens. Most of us are quite rightly concerned mainly with day-to-day survival — and with actually loving (and sometimes enduring) the immediate circle of our parents, siblings, children, and friends. We are content to carry the fragmentary stories of all these people around in our heads; why go to the trouble to write any of it down?

If it’s worth writing the history of a city or social movement or nation, however, doesn’t a family deserve similar respect? To care even a little for your family history — of your living relatives but also of ancestors direct and collateral whom you never knew — is, after all, an act of respect and of love. You’ll find this crowd of your relatives to be a very mixed bag: there are successes and failures; bores and charmers; maybe even saints and sinners. The work of curating their stories — and of adding our own to theirs — cannot help but inculcate in each of us involved in the project a degree of humility (and awe), and inspire empathy for the larger human family. We discover in creating this archive that, like others, we too were once displaced by war; we too have been immigrants. We built and farmed, bought and sold, squabbled with and cared for each other. New lives enter the circle of our family through marriage, birth, and adoption. Some leave by choice, and all of us eventually do when our time comes. Meanwhile we struggle, achieve, stumble, rebound and get on with life. Through it all, we acknowledge, know, care for, and remember each other. (Yeah, OK, we love each other.) As a family, we perdure.

So, who or what is our family of which this is a record?

My choice to follow the Robison line is admittedly somewhat arbitrary.  I am a Robison but also, on my mother’s side, a Kerry.  Dad, for his part, was a Robison but also a Bass. Mom meanwhile was a Kerry but also a Moran. It’s pure social convention that in our culture, as each new household of the family is formed, the patronymic usually prevails and the mother’s family name disappears after a generation or two. But from a biological and even “cultural” point of view, I’m as much a Kerry as I am a Robison. I could also as easily have been considered a Bass — or a Victor, Moran, Connelly, Lamson, McAvoy, McGinty, Monroe, and so on. Four generations back (which is about as far as I can go with any detail), there are sixteen family names in my direct lineage. Only one of them is Robison.  So, Robison is merely the flag of convenience under which I sail.

Everything I have said about myself is also true of you, too. Wherever you may overlap with me on this unfolding web of connection, you are also linked to other families. This is about relationship, not identity.

In the end, Robison is the family because we’ve decided it’s the family. My other possible ancestral lines are dormant mainly because of their lack of interest in perpetuating themselves as a family in a purposeful, transgenerational way. Intentionality bulks larger than biology in families.

And if you have any doubt about the primacy of intention over blood-relation when thinking genealogically about family, consider this: every child gets some DNA from the father’s side and some from the mother’s. You’re always a blend. We think of this as the irreducible, scientifically-founded basis of family connection. But because of the mechanics of biology, each pairing rarely results in an exact fifty-fifty split. So, for example, although you and everyone else on the planet has no more and no fewer than sixteen great-great-grandparents, you can’t really say that you’re precisely one-sixteenth part of each of each these genealogical forebears. Some of them actually figure slightly larger than others in terms of your DNA. It can even happen — and there is a statistically non-neglible possibility of this after only a few dozen generations or so —  that you may not be related genetically at all to someone who is legitimately your own genealogical ancestor! In other words, it is possible for you not have any of the DNA of someone who is on your family tree. Don’t worry. You can still consider your great-great granny to be part of your family. Intentionality rules.

As I have mentioned, the best sort of family history is the one written by the individuals who appear in the narrative. I also noted that almost no one takes the trouble to do this. As a consequence, unless we knew them personally, even our own grandparents are often strangers to us. Beyond them, it’s total darkness. And we ourselves will be strangers to our children’s children.

Against this neglect by most families to record and pass on their own story, bureaucracy often comes to the rescue: names of our ancestors appear in the decennial census, on ship manifests, on regimental muster rolls, on cadastral surveys and in marriage and death records. Three cheers for the bureaucrats and the files they keep!

But all of this official record-keeping results mainly in “tombstone genealogy:” names and dates and places, but no real story. (The same is true of the ongoing digital record now accumulating on each of us.) We are objects in these records made by others, not subjects of a narrative authored by us. It’s like appearing in the background of someone else’s snapshot, obscure and in poor focus. At best, others observed us and made notes — for their own purposes and ends. If we didn’t do the same, it’s really their story, not ours.

While poking around one repository of such dry, bureaucratic records — the National Archives in Washington, DC — I discovered an unexpected and happy result of official record-keeping. William O. Robison (1844 – 1917), my great-grandfather, had a long-running dispute with the federal Pension Office after the Civil War. The government was skeptical about his claim of having been injured in battle, but William O. pressed his case. He wrote letters. He solicited statements from the surviving veterans of his regiment. The Pension Office was forced to investigate, resulting in formal depositions of him and many people he knew.  Later, in 1906, after he had broken his leg, Great-grandpa Robison once more tried to have his pension adjusted. There was another round of depositions and, like the good bureaucrats they were, the Pension Office investigators filed their work away — where I was able to see it more than a century later. 

Now, it is of the essence of the bureaucratic mentality not only to carefully preserve official documents, but also to generate the paperwork itself in a systematic manner. Bureaucrats are not poets. They don’t wonder what sorts of questions they will ask. They proceed like scientific researchers, not like novelists. They fill in the forms as required and follow the checklists. In this case, they began by asking William O. and his wife, Sally Victor, to review key events in their lives, and asking friends, neighbors, and old Army buddies for factual details about Robison’s life.

The Pension Office, in other words, provided a model for what we family members could have done for ourselves, had we been thinking genealogically, i.e., pause from time to time and make an account of our lives, noting the highlights and significant turning points. The key is to keep it simple and to the point, and write it down. Put it in a safe place. Add other data and evidence  — letters, photographs — as we see fit. Do it not for the government, but for our own family, especially for those who will never know any of this unless we take the time to memorialize it.

I have tried here to emphasize, in fact, that to “think genealogically” is not only, or even primarily, to be concerned with the past. Yes, our forebears helped make us who we are, mainly through the families they nurtured in the households they created. It’s good to know about them. We can sometimes and to a certain degree fill in the fragments of their stories, even when they didn’t do it themselves. To do so is an act of respect and even of reverence. But we are not only descendants; we are also ancestors. Our main genealogical work is to tell our own story for those who will follow us. The very act of recording our lives for them might raise our consciousness of the world we are bequeathing to our collective children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren.  (Even if we do not personally have offspring, the family as a whole will.) Is this progeny of ours, as a result of how we ourselves are living now, more likely to inhabit a safe, inclusive, and just world? Let’s make that be the true story of our lives, and let’s tell it!

If you ready to join a project of this sort, register as a member and take a stab at telling your story.  Because this archive is set up in the spirit of a silva rerum, you can only see and contribute to the record if you are part of the family. Besides telling your own story, you can also help construct the stories of our forebears about whom we (together) probably know lots of fragmentary details. I have primed the pump, but you may know things that I don’t. My fragments (and eventually yours) are recorded on the blog posts.