A friend of mine says, "My ancestors are who they were and I'm who I am and what difference does it make who they were anyway?"
Indeed, what difference does genealogy make? Does it matter whether we descend from a long line of horse thieves or bankers? Does it really influence who we are?
You better bet it does.
It influences who we are for better or worse, regardless of whether we know it.
But knowing our heritage can help us rise above an unsavory family history or aspire to maintain a noble tradition. Failure to understand our history can grease the skids that might carry us downward.
Just ask Paul Davis how knowing his heritage has influenced him. Davis is no genealogist, but his life was profoundly altered by a serendipitous ancestral discovery.
He was born 42 years ago in Roseburg, Ore., son of an alcoholic father, a drifter who flitted from one job to another, from one opportunity to the next.
By the time he was 7 years old, Davis had lived in six states. When he graduated from high school his family was on welfare and he lived in about 15 different towns.
Davis hated growing up on welfare, so when he graduated from high school he immediately went to work. "I was a laborer in a pea factory," Davis recalled. "Then I learned to drive a fork lift and became a fork lift operator for a company that made Fiberglas boats."
Later, Davis learned to weld and got a job at a steel company. This led to a job in sales, which Davis pursued for 10 years in Spokane and Seattle until the company he worked for went out of business during the recession in 1983.
While working for the steel company, Davis had attended evening seminary classes at an unaccredited Bible college sponsored by the Church of Christ.
Soon after his career in steel folded, Davis was offered a vacant ministerial position in Deer Park, a community near Spokane.
Davis' ministry was well-accepted. He labored three years in Deer Park and then accepted the job as an associate pastor of a larger congregation in Spokane. He really enjoyed counseling members of his flock, but he didn't enjoy the pulpit.
"For a lack of a better term," Davis recalls, "I had a midlife crisis and didn't want to get up there any more and dictate how everyone should live their lives." As his midlife crisis grew, Davis received a telephone call from a distant cousin who was trying to pull together the family genealogy. She extracted information from Davis about the contemporary family, but he knew nothing beyond his grandparents' generation.
"There was nothing written, no family mythology or folklore," Davis recalled. Like many people, he didn't even know where his grandparents were from.
His cousin told him his grandparents, John and America Davis, died in Columbia Falls, Mont., where John had been a Baptist minister.
"I started wondering why I was a minister," Paul said. "Was I predisposed?" One day he drove his family to Columbia Falls and searched the cemetery for his grandparents' graves.
"I sat on John's grave, and I know this sounds kind of weird, but I just talked to him and told him about myself and then I talked to my grandmother, America, and told her about myself. I don't know why I did that, but it was a tremendously satisfying emotional experience."
The incident set Paul's mind on a course of self-discovery that altered his life.
"I started wondering about mother's side," Paul recalled. So he called his mother in Seattle. She knew little of her family, but told Paul about a relative who had a book on the family.
"I said 'you're kidding me, our family's genealogy is in a book?'" Paul said. In fact, the book was in two volumes. Paul's maternal heritage is none other than that of the Noyes family.
Paul discovered that his eighth maternal great-grandfather was James Noyes, a minister's son who rebelled against the Church of England and fled Ipswich, England, for Connecticut. John, also a minister, settled in New Haven, and was one of the founders of Yale University.
The revelation was a thunderclap for Paul. He looked at other men in the Noyes family. "They were bankers and accountants and professional people all the way down the line. I thought, this is really fantastic. It was an inspiration to me.
"I have regretted not going straight into college from high school because I could have become what I wanted to become all the time and not wasted all those years working for a steel company and not doing what I wanted to do," Paul said.
He thinks his life might have been different if he had known his heritage.
"Who had the books? The genealogy books? It wasn't my mom, it was my uncle. He had the rich heritage. He became a physicist and a prominent civil leader in Seattle."
His uncle's four children all graduated from college. None of the children in Davis' birth family had gone to college. Davis says his mother "didn't know where we came from ... she didn't have the guidance and direction and inspiration that was provided by all these progenitors who came before her.
"I wonder if I'd had someone say to me, 'Paul, you have a great family tradition of intellectual inquiry, of higher intellectual pursuits, of being a person with high standards to use your profession to help others,' if I'd had that early on ... if my parents could have used that as a means of directing me, maybe I would have excelled in in high school and gone straight to college."
Davis' new-found knowledge did change his life, giving him a new direction.
In 1989, he applied to Washington State University and was accepted into the honors program.
He received his bachelor's degree in 1993 and now is in the second year of a four-year program that will culminate in a doctoral degree and certification as a clinical psychologist.
"I think that the bottom line is that knowing where our roots come from can provide for a guiding inspiration to help us achieve what we wouldn't achieve if we were left without that inspiration," Davis summarized.
*** This article was originally published in the February 19th, 1995 edition of the Tri-City Herald, 107 N. Cascade St., Kennewick, Wash., 99336
.
Photo of Deputy Sheriff, 1998
32" X 35", acrylic on foamcore by Harold Crowell.
A friend of mine says, "My ancestors are who they were and I'm who I am and what difference does it make who they were anyway?"
Indeed, what difference does genealogy make? Does it matter whether we descend from a long line of horse thieves or bankers? Does it really influence who we are?
You better bet it does.
It influences who we are for better or worse, regardless of whether we know it.
But knowing our heritage can help us rise above an unsavory family history or aspire to maintain a noble tradition. Failure to understand our history can grease the skids that might carry us downward.
Just ask Paul Davis how knowing his heritage has influenced him. Davis is no genealogist, but his life was profoundly altered by a serendipitous ancestral discovery.
He was born 42 years ago in Roseburg, Ore., son of an alcoholic father, a drifter who flitted from one job to another, from one opportunity to the next.
By the time he was 7 years old, Davis had lived in six states. When he graduated from high school his family was on welfare and he lived in about 15 different towns.
Davis hated growing up on welfare, so when he graduated from high school he immediately went to work. "I was a laborer in a pea factory," Davis recalled. "Then I learned to drive a fork lift and became a fork lift operator for a company that made Fiberglas boats."
Later, Davis learned to weld and got a job at a steel company. This led to a job in sales, which Davis pursued for 10 years in Spokane and Seattle until the company he worked for went out of business during the recession in 1983.
While working for the steel company, Davis had attended evening seminary classes at an unaccredited Bible college sponsored by the Church of Christ.
Soon after his career in steel folded, Davis was offered a vacant ministerial position in Deer Park, a community near Spokane.
Davis' ministry was well-accepted. He labored three years in Deer Park and then accepted the job as an associate pastor of a larger congregation in Spokane. He really enjoyed counseling members of his flock, but he didn't enjoy the pulpit.
"For a lack of a better term," Davis recalls, "I had a midlife crisis and didn't want to get up there any more and dictate how everyone should live their lives." As his midlife crisis grew, Davis received a telephone call from a distant cousin who was trying to pull together the family genealogy. She extracted information from Davis about the contemporary family, but he knew nothing beyond his grandparents' generation.
"There was nothing written, no family mythology or folklore," Davis recalled. Like many people, he didn't even know where his grandparents were from.
His cousin told him his grandparents, John and America Davis, died in Columbia Falls, Mont., where John had been a Baptist minister.
"I started wondering why I was a minister," Paul said. "Was I predisposed?" One day he drove his family to Columbia Falls and searched the cemetery for his grandparents' graves.
"I sat on John's grave, and I know this sounds kind of weird, but I just talked to him and told him about myself and then I talked to my grandmother, America, and told her about myself. I don't know why I did that, but it was a tremendously satisfying emotional experience."
The incident set Paul's mind on a course of self-discovery that altered his life.
"I started wondering about mother's side," Paul recalled. So he called his mother in Seattle. She knew little of her family, but told Paul about a relative who had a book on the family.
"I said 'you're kidding me, our family's genealogy is in a book?'" Paul said. In fact, the book was in two volumes. Paul's maternal heritage is none other than that of the Noyes family.
Paul discovered that his eighth maternal great-grandfather was James Noyes, a minister's son who rebelled against the Church of England and fled Ipswich, England, for Connecticut. John, also a minister, settled in New Haven, and was one of the founders of Yale University.
The revelation was a thunderclap for Paul. He looked at other men in the Noyes family. "They were bankers and accountants and professional people all the way down the line. I thought, this is really fantastic. It was an inspiration to me.
"I have regretted not going straight into college from high school because I could have become what I wanted to become all the time and not wasted all those years working for a steel company and not doing what I wanted to do," Paul said.
He thinks his life might have been different if he had known his heritage.
"Who had the books? The genealogy books? It wasn't my mom, it was my uncle. He had the rich heritage. He became a physicist and a prominent civil leader in Seattle."
His uncle's four children all graduated from college. None of the children in Davis' birth family had gone to college. Davis says his mother "didn't know where we came from ... she didn't have the guidance and direction and inspiration that was provided by all these progenitors who came before her.
"I wonder if I'd had someone say to me, 'Paul, you have a great family tradition of intellectual inquiry, of higher intellectual pursuits, of being a person with high standards to use your profession to help others,' if I'd had that early on ... if my parents could have used that as a means of directing me, maybe I would have excelled in in high school and gone straight to college."
Davis' new-found knowledge did change his life, giving him a new direction.
In 1989, he applied to Washington State University and was accepted into the honors program.
He received his bachelor's degree in 1993 and now is in the second year of a four-year program that will culminate in a doctoral degree and certification as a clinical psychologist.
"I think that the bottom line is that knowing where our roots come from can provide for a guiding inspiration to help us achieve what we wouldn't achieve if we were left without that inspiration," Davis summarized.
*** This article was originally published in the February 19th, 1995 edition of the Tri-City Herald, 107 N. Cascade St., Kennewick, Wash., 99336
.