Exposing My Roots: How Genealogy Helped with My Ancestral Healing

Twenty-ish years ago I was in a pretty rough place in my life. I was missing work and college classes regularly due to pain and sickness coursing through my body; I was seeing a therapist for depression and anxiety; and I had stopped speaking to my father after yet another argument threatened to turn violent. I was a mess, minimally functional, and barely had the energy to hold my life together. But it was in this existential compost heap that an idea was planted: maybe I could make sense of it all if I just understood who I came from.

I had grown up with my biological family, so it wasn’t that I didn’t know who my parents were. And I knew my grandparents, and even had four great-grandparents alive when I was born. But my knowledge of these parties was superficial, and my family made it clear that a deeper examination was off-limits. With the exception of my one grandmother’s Sicilian heritage, there was no ethnic or cultural knowledge to learn from or identify with in any other part of my family. Who were we? Where did we come from? What was our history? And why was everyone so unwilling to talk about it?

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It’s fairly common, I’ve learned since then, for families to keep secrets. There are situations and experiences that people have lived through — or not — that are just too hard to talk about, too painful to remember. Many of us come from families of origin who believed (and still do) that silence was the better route, that denying their pain would somehow lessen their suffering, and prevent anyone else’s. These days, we have a much better awareness of what trauma does to humans, how its effects can be passed on in our DNA, how it can impact children or grandchildren who weren’t even alive during the time of the initial trauma. We understand that processing these events through therapy can drastically improve one’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health — as well as that of descendants who may come after them.

But for now, the secrets abide. Skeletons remain tucked away in dark corners of forgotten closets, waiting to be discovered. And if you’re like me, and come from a family who either refused to discuss the past or simply did not know their past — or a family who outright lied about it — genealogy might be the only way to get answers and fill the gaps in our family narratives.

When I introduced my ancestral findings into my talk therapy (with a therapist specializing in family systems), powerful changes began to take place. Here are some of the ways that my genealogical research influenced my path to healing.

1. Discovering objective facts accelerates my progress.
   While no one document is guaranteed to be without error, there is a wealth of information available in vital records, court documents, census data, newspapers, etc. Surely our distant relatives did not anticipate that one day all of these obscure documents would be digitized and searchable, but many of them are — more every day. In my experience, events and details that I had never heard started coming to light, providing me with moments of epiphany and understanding. In some cases, public records fully contradicted an existing family story. These are details that I never would have obtained from family members. Seeking my own answers — and finding them — gave me new insights as well as the agency to begin the healing work that was dependent on that discovery.

2. Identifying patterns of trauma, abuse, or hardship shifts my perspective.
   Being able to identify familial cycles and patterns around trauma, loss, abuse, depression, poverty, shame, and other types of hardship gave me an awareness that was broader than my own singular life. Whether these patterns had been passed on behaviorally or genetically, they persisted across time. Acknowledging, for example, that violent tendencies existed in several generations before mine helped me to understand that my own experience with an abusive parent was actually not isolated. A new possibility dawned for me that he was just replicating the parenting patterns he had grown up with, and that his parents had replicated the patterns they had grown up with. Seeing the issue as a bigger, systemic one, as a cycle repeating across generations, gave me the perspective needed to interrupt it, examine it, and shut it down.

3. Uncovering my ancestors’ stories creates connection.
   Identifying something as simple as an ancestor’s name or as detailed as how many children they buried can create emotional bonds where none existed before. I’ve found records describing my ancestors’ appearance, their occupations, their interests. I’ve been able to go back in time and trace the places they’ve lived and the countries they came from. I’ve been fortunate to learn the specific town in Sicily where my great-grandmother was born, and uncover the circumstances of her adoption. In turn, this allows me to connect emotionally to her story not only as an individual tale, but also one of her community, her culture, and to the geography of that land and place. For me, this connection has evolved into a fairly spiritual one, re-uniting me with practices and landscapes that nourish my intellect as well as my soul.

4. Increasing my awareness of self changes my relationship to the world.
   For me, it’s impossible to separate the research into my ancestors’ immigrant history in the United States from the history of the lands and times in which they lived. The more recent stories of ancestral immigration have influenced my views in today’s political landscape, and the older stories of settlement have pushed me to confront my colonizer roots and reckon with my ancestors’ roles in America’s genocidal origins. Who lived on that land before my forebears arrived? Where did those people go? Did my ancestors fight in any wars? On which side? Did they own slaves? And yet, what a privilege it is that I can even trace records back that far in the first place, because most of my relatives were white Europeans and considered worthy of documentation. Everything I’ve learned in these last few years has challenged everything (I thought) I already knew. The process of unlearning and relearning has begun. I am now even more aware that lenses of culture and privilege exist, that it’s through these lenses that I interact with the world. Now new challenges arise, like: What responsibility do I have as both a genealogist and as a human being to act meaningfully on this new knowledge?

5. Accepting what is helps me move forward with compassion.
   As much as all of this knowledge has brought meaning and healing into my life, it has also opened up new questions, and in some cases arrived at uncomfortable, even undesirable conclusions. It has also taught me that it’s normal to not have immediate clarity on my feelings about a given situation, it’s normal to have multiple contradictory feelings that coexist in complicated ways, as opposed to one obvious, single emotion. For example, finding the truth about my great-grandmother’s abandonment as a newborn in Sicily was both joyful and heartbreaking. Joyful in that I’d found long-sought answers; heartbreaking to learn that the truth was quite sad, and that the secret had been kept for so long. This arrangement was almost definitely anonymous, meaning that no record will ever be found that tells me who her parents were. That information simply wasn’t recorded. Unless DNA matches us with long lost relatives, it’s unlikely that I will ever know the woman who birthed her, nor the conditions under which she surrendered her child a few hours later. I have to accept that these dead ends will exist. Also, it’s uncomfortable to realize that your ancestors played a part in violent histories or genocidal practices, but the first step to any kind of healing — for myself and for others — is accepting what is. Knowing who my relatives are, where they lived, where they fit in society, or even what kind of awful experiences they caused or endured allows me to grieve, to feel a variety of ways about what they’ve done, but then look on the rest of the story with compassion for them, their children, and the people they hurt. I’m not suggesting forgiveness per se, and not absolution, but rather understanding and acknowledgement. The path to healing may take time to appear, but sitting with that acceptance is a critical first step.

For me. personally, this has been a decades-long process involving numerous methods of therapy and healing. Different combinations will work for different people, and on different timelines — each needs to find their own. But I don’t think the work’s done yet for me. As long as there is more information to discover, and more emotion to process, there is more healing work to do.