Happy Mother's Day to Lucy, And to All the Unknown Ancestor Mothers

I’ve had the good fortune to be asked to tell the story of John and Lucy about a dozen times all over the country since I first told it to a group of about four hundred lawyers in Los Angeles at the USC Trust and Estate Conference in 2015.  These days, I like to say I’ve told the story from Monterey to Madison, and from New York to New Mexico, and at this point, it’s been heard by at least a couple thousand people.

Invariably when I’m done talking and flipping power point slides, I am greeted by a few people who have the time and inclination to come and talk to me.  Many share with me about similar experiences they’ve had discovering unexpected bits of family history — Native American blood, or an Ellis Island story; or they want to learn more about John and Lucy, and details of how I came to uncover the facts that our family has managed to gather.  But from time to time, I’m approached by someone, usually African-American, who says they loved hearing my family’s story, but they wish they had proof or knowledge of their connection to their own specific heritage.  Some say they can’t go back farther than their grandparents, and express how lucky I am to be able to trace back so far, and to have the documents to support the stories.

If they have the time I tell them that about twenty years ago, I didn’t know about my own family history at all.  What others had dug up, hadn’t been shared with me, or I had just never bothered to dig and try to find answers. In fact, I remember going to an exhibition of photographs of African-Americans from the post-Civil War era.  I was deeply affected by the intimacy of the images, and by the way the subjects’ gaze straight at me, direct, across the generations, made those people real and relevant, not historical and distant.  I was so moved by those images that I wrote an op-ed that was published in the Los Angeles Times. I can’t find that piece today, but what I remember most was describing the sense that even though I didn’t know the stories of my own ancestors (at the time), and thought I never would, that just being able to see those black faces of strangers peering out from tiny 2”X2” frames, connected me personally with the past.  I felt like the people who’d kept those pictures, and who shared them with visitors to the exhibit, were giving us a chance to have a piece of that history — that those people in the frames, belonged to all of us, even if they were only genetically connected to certain individuals.

     Now, two decades later, having found a provable connection to my biological ancestors, when people tell me they wish they had knowledge of their own family history, I tell them first, that they might be surprised what history is out there — that the same forces that brought my family’s story to me — God, or destiny, or the ancestors themselves, might bring the same stories to them, if they open themselves up, and search for the clues of the connection to the past.  But even if they can’t find the physical evidence to connect them to specific people who lived and breathed and laughed and loved generations ago, that their presence here, feet away from me in the year 2017, is proof of their ancestors’ existence.  That their blood is pumping with the blood of their ancestors, who overcame tortures and terrors unimaginable so that they could be here today.  And whether they are ever able to find their own direct tie to a specific soul from long ago, that John and Lucy are here for them.  The history that I’ve been given the honor to share is a family history that we all share.