Required Reading for Would-Be Genealogists

Book Review: The Night Sky: A Journey From Dachau to Denver and Back by Maria Sutton

If one were to believe the television advertisements, tracing your family history is as simple as logging in to a website and clicking on a picture of a leaf. Archives will miraculously open to reveal that your great-grandfather was a private detective who lived next door to Henry Ford and invented the limited-slip differential. Who forgot to mention THAT?

Sadly, as Maria Sutton (and this author) can attest, genealogy is not that simple, even in the digital age. As she details in The Night Sky, Ms. Sutton's journey to find the father she never knew is a more accurate reflection of what a family history researcher actually goes through. The Night Sky is required reading for any would-be genealogist.

The first obstacle facing the new family historian is the reluctance of relatives. Every family has skeletons in the closet - or at least they believe they do. Even if those skeletons have decayed into dust, there are members of your family who will try to divert you from finding out "the truth about Uncle Joe", whose sin was too deep and dark to reveal. They mean well, they just don't want you to embarrass the family in your efforts to "dredge up" the past.

The second hurdle is the inaccuracy and unavailability of records. A tree full of leaves notwithstanding, not everything you see can be taken at face value. The index you are searching online is a transcription of a blurry and possibly misspelled handwritten record. Check and double-check your sources; don't mistake the tree for the leaves.

And finally, as Maria Sutton herself learned, the toughest roadblock to the truth is your own mindset. While you may want to believe your forefather (or mother) was a a local hero, for most of us it simply is not true. Just because they were alive while important events were happening does not mean they were involved in them; it's hard to be objective when it comes to your own ancestry.

The moral of The Night Sky is that no matter what you may have thought of them, and no matter how far from that perception they landed, your ancestors DID play an important part in life -- they made YOU possible. Maria Sutton's journey to find her family may not be the stuff TV commercials are made of, but it was worth the trip.

Grandma's Dirty Little Secret

Book Review: My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner by Meir Shalev

This is how it is: author Meir Shalev has taken the threads of family history and woven them into a tale that drapes as easily as a babushka over the head of the family, in this case Grandma Tonia. Every family has a skeleton or two in the closet; Grandma has a sweeper in the bathroom. Or does she? A story doesn't have to have a point -- the story IS the point.

As the title My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner implies, this is in no small part a tale of the clash of cultures (and cultural values). Americans have long been upheld as the personification of luxury and comfort, and reviled for those very same qualities at the same time. 'Luxury' implies laziness, 'comfort' equals complacence. It is not simply a case of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots', but goes deeper into values and ideals.

And when your ideal is cleanliness, the value of a vacuum cleaner would be priceless, or so one would think. Like magic the dirt disappears, never to be seen or heard from again. It is a miracle of modern science, as long as we ignore the law of conservation of mass. And then at last the weighty dilemma occurs - who sweeps the sweeper?

Shalev manages the diversity of cultural history and values with sure hands - the story of My Russian Grandmother could happen anywhere, and in any time. In fact, I am sure it has. While not everyone has a Grandma Tonia or an Uncle Yitzhak, we have all had people like them in our lives and in our own families. The idiosyncrasies that make us individuals are the very things we have in common.

An enjoyable read, filled with humorous insight into obsessive-compulsive behavior as well as the Freudian aspects of a manicure, My Russian Grandmother is part James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, part my own uncle Dave reminiscing about life on the farm in the Depression (if my family had been Jewish and Israel was Minnesota.) If you don't have stories like this in YOUR family, you should make some up.