The other day, I read a newspaper article that really made me think. The article was about a woman whose family history research recently revealed some details of events in her father’s past that her parents and other family members had carefully kept from her for her entire life. The events date back to the 1940’s, and they run contrary to what she was raised to believe about Birmingham, Alabama, where she often went to visit her grandparents in the 1960’s.
The woman who is the subject of the article is African American. As many of you know, Birmingham, Alabama was at the heart of the Civil Rights movement. Many marches, demonstrations, and other events happened there that made the nation aware of Birmingham and not always in a positive way. While the woman was aware of the incidents that happened in Birmingham during the 1960’s, she was not aware of the personal injustices and indignities that her father had suffered there a couple of decades earlier as a young man. Her parents made sure that the Birmingham that she experienced on her visits there felt safe and welcoming. They painted a picture of a place filled with hope, not with hatred; a resilient community, not one torn apart across racial lines.
When this woman learned that her father had been shot in the leg by a police officer while he was living in Birmingham in the 1940’s, those images were shattered. She became keenly aware of what her family and many others have done over the years to prevent unpleasant incidents in their family history from shaping the lives of the younger generations. If children are told that hatred and violence are to be expected from a certain group of people, or that they should not trust another group of individuals, they will grow to accept these things as true. If, instead they are raised to be hopeful and courageous, and to believe that the world is a generally friendly place, filled with mostly kind-hearted people, then that will become their truth. Children learn what the world is like through direct experience, but much of this learning is a product of their environment – where do their parents bring them? What do they tell them about other people? What do they teach their children to expect from other people, and from life in general? This places parents in a precarious position.
While many of us may be surprised to learn about negative events in our family’s history when we do discover them, we cannot really be surprised that we were not made aware of them while we were younger. It is not as much an effort by our parents or other family members to be untruthful as it is an effort to selectively reveal certain information while remaining silent about other information. I thought about the woman in the news story and wondered whether there are any secrets hiding in my family tree. I have not discovered any yet. I also realized that since I am now a mother, I play a large role in shaping the way that my son views the world. He’s only ten months old so I have not been having conversations with him about my life growing up, but I can certainly imagine that there will be things that I talk about, and things that I do not. Whether you are talking about your personal history or researching your family history, what will you do when you get to the unsavory parts?