Family history, genealogy, and the complicated concept of "cycle-breaking"

In which I turn 46 and go digging into my grandmother's messy roots.

Last week I turned 46. That number may seem a little less significant than a nice round 40 or 50, or the midpoint years - 35, 45, 55. But actually, 46 felt more significant in a way. Because 46 is officially on the other side of the 40s midpoint.

I’m on the tail end of my mid-40s now. One could even argue that 46 is the late 40s.

At 44 I was still having academic arguments with myself about whether I really qualified as “middle-aged.” Now a brief two years later - which has felt more like two blinks - I am undeniably in midlife and careening toward my 50s.

How did that happen?

I’ll tell you how it happened: time just keeps going by, and we are powerless to slow it down. Maybe that’s why it felt so appropriate to spend the bulk of my birthday week with my older sister Kathreen (who will turn 56 in a couple days!) retracing our maternal grandmother’s steps as a young woman in Michigan’s Copper Country, the name given to a collection of small mining towns along the Lake Superior shoreline in the Upper Peninsula.

We visited the historical archives at Michigan Technological University, where we learned that not only our great-grandmother, but also four of her siblings and her mother, died from the tuberculosis outbreak that was particularly rampant up there. We found the addresses of several houses where our grandmother’s family lived and drove by, trying to get a sense for what their lives were like. We visited gravesites of great- and great-great and great-great-great grandparents, and a cabin my step-grandpa built, where my grandmother and Mom lived when she was a little girl.

It took me the better part of a relaxing weekend to begin shaking the heaviness of it all, and to begin to absorb the significance. For example, I am almost half as old as my grandma was (95) when she died. How is this possible? I still feel so young and she was, like, ancient. But I will be ancient before too long.

And also, 95 years is nothing. Last week I poured over original hand-written documents dating back 100+ years and it seemed like they could have been written yesterday. I’m looking out my back window right now at trees that are easily 100 years old and just helped my family open a bookstore in a building that’s been around since the 1800s.

Time (and the passing of it) can be a real mind job if you think about it too hard.

And can we talk about the absolute horror of losing half your family to tuberculosis? As well as the poverty my grandmother, and so many other families in that region, were living in around that time. My grandmother herself - the eldest of twelve kids, ten of them half-siblings born to her father’s new wife after her mother died, of TB, at 24 - was admitted to the tuberculosis sanatorium twice, and spent more than a year there while my mother was just a baby.

According to my Aunt Kay, my grandmother’s youngest child, after having her lung surgically collapsed (a common treatment in those days) they told Gramma that the next step would be to have ribs removed. She fled the sanatorium soon after (negative for TB, but against medical advice) and married my step-grandfather, moving to Highland Park to begin work at Chrysler.

My mom returned to the U.P. as an adult, and my sister and I both grew up there. As we took in the physical beauty of a place that has always felt to my sister and I like a long-lost home, we mused about how Gramma couldn’t wait to get out of the Upper Peninsula and now here we are, trying to get back, to make it ours again.

But of course that’s how it would be: to her, the U.P. represented deprivation and despair; to us, it feels like beauty and freedom. One’s feelings about a place will depend a lot on what they experience while they’re there, and Gram’s experiences were Not So Good.

As my Aunt Kay told my sister and I on the phone the other day, Gramma took the first chance she got to leave the U.P. for the Detroit area and the booming auto industry. Gram was always looking forward, planning her next move, Aunt Kay said - a trait that I can definitely identify with.

How much of my forward-thinking, keep-moving-so-you-can-dodge-the-other-shoe-dropping nature is due to the DNA my grandma’s experiences helped write into my genetic code?

Even in hard times, Gramma (on the right) knew how to have a good time.

Which brings me, finally, to the concept of “cycle breaking.” It’s a popular idea these days, but to me, it feels like a misnomer - not to mention an awful lot of pressure on the person or couple trying to “break” a cycle for the sake of their kids.

There are a lot of things my siblings’ families have the privilege of doing differently from Gram’s family or my mother’s family of origin because we were born into different circumstances.

No one person “broke” the cycle; it’s more that the conditions that help poverty and neglect and abuse and illness exist themselves change over the years due to many people, many decisions, and many other changes in the world around them.

Like many poor families, my grandma’s parents moved a lot. Many of the addresses we found and drove by were now empty lots, like this one.

100 years after my grandmother was born, there definitely things that her grandkids and great-grandkids are doing differently, just like my grandmother did things differently from her parents. But I think it would be inaccurate to say that we “broke” anything. I’m still my grandmother’s granddaughter and my mother’s daughter, with all the good and bad that entails.

I think it’s more accurate to say that the old ways get diluted. If your parents were verbally abusive, for example, or if financial stress was common in your family of origin, you might dilute your urge to yell at your kids or make reactive decisions about money by making different choices at many opportunities over the years. You water down the cycle with new information, new influences, and hard self-work.

And it’s not just you doing this on your own; you’re hopefully supported by your spouse and friends and the culture of your community. You’ll also make mistakes and slip backward along the way. It isn’t a one-and-one “break” but a slow, gradual shift in which some really wonderful things about your family of origin may also be lost.

My siblings and I (I’m the “rich lady” on the right, Halloween 1981. No, my brother was not supposed to be dressed as a Nazi.

Maybe that’s what feels so heavy to me this week: the pressure to do things better than my parents or grandparents or great-grandparents did while also wanting to hold on to the good, and not knowing where one thing stops and the other starts. The realization that for every “bad” thing that gets diluted over the years, there’s something irreplaceable and good that also shrinks away to nearly nothing. The knowledge that something precious about those generations has been lost, or at least buried, and I don’t even know where to look to dig it up.

There’s a reason so many of us get interested in genealogy and family history research in midlife, right? We start to sense the conflict between the urge to move forward, and what all that forward movement leaves behind. We want to make sense of where we come from and how it impacts our family’s narrative. We want to know that what we do here will matter in the end and we reassure ourselves that we’ll be remembered and acknowledge, by seeking to remember and acknowledge those that came before.

In the end, my grandmother’s family of origin was scattered around the country and the state, and now their burial places are also scattered, in some cases their graves marked stones crumbled and moss-covered with age, in other cases not marked at all. For every photo or news clipping or home I manage to find there are others rotted or demolished or simply lost to time.

This is my great-grandmother’s obituary, in which both her name and her father’s name are misspelled - making it even harder to piece together a narrative.

And so it will be for me: though the digital age may make it seem as though my writing and photos and evidence of my homes and belongings will last forever, will some great-grandchild of mine really want to dig through 10000 screen shots in my Google Photos in order to uncover some tidbits about what my life was like?

I hope so. (Or maybe I hope not…some of those screenshots, without context, could really give the wrong idea about a person..)

Mostly I just hope that those some-day descendants treat me, and whatever my legacy becomes, with compassion and curiosity. That whatever unhealthy cycles I’ve perpetuated or perhaps, created from scratch, they view in the context of the world I live in and have lived in. That after all the dilution of time and distance and the addition of other genes, something of me is still left.

And that that little piece, even as it dilutes more, still persists - long after the world I inhabit now is a thing of the past.

You’ve just read a free post on my publication, Reinventing. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing. Free subscribers get my weekly-ish posts delivered to their inbox, and paid get bimonthly Reinvention Sessions, including exclusive video+audio content you won’t find elsewhere.