Have you ever wanted to know more about your family's history? This book helps generations connect with questions

TarcherPerigee image via The Atlantic

How much do you know about your mom or dad's life before they became a parent? Many of us know precious little, and when it comes to grandparents, aunts and uncles, we know even less. Anthropologist and professor Elizabeth Keating takes us on the journey of how her book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, came to be in her story for The Atlantic.

In her work, Keating explored how family tales passed through generations, but as she researched the topic, a surprising pattern emerged. Keating writes, "I have been astonished to find that so many people know little of the lives of their parents and grandparents, despite the fact that they lived through some pretty interesting decades. Even my students, some of whom majored in history and excelled at it, were largely in the dark about their own family history."

As it turns out, many of us spent holidays, birthdays and family celebrations with loved ones we barely knew. "The reason many people don't know very much about their grandparents or even their parents is surprisingly simple: They've never thought to ask and didn't have the right questions," Keating explains. "When I saw how much I was learning as I interviewed families, I decided to ask my students at the University of Texas to do the same, tasking them with interviewing one of their grandparents using my questions."

As many a journalist can testify, interviews can go in surprising directions. Keating writes, "In one interview, a grandmother shared that when she was a girl during the Nazi era, one of her classmates suddenly disappeared, and none of the adults around her would talk about it. . . . . Another student's grandma talked about having to wait at the back of a restaurant to have her food handed through a window, because she was Cajun and couldn't go inside."

Keating's guide uses questions spanning 13 topics. "They include basic background information, such as where someone was born, as well as more abstract inquiries, such as how someone conceives of their identity, what they believe in, and what they've noticed about the passage of time," Keating notes. "Specificity is key. . . . And remember that the most important questions can also be the plainest. One of my favorites is just 'What do you wish people knew about you?'"

As people learn about their family members, they are keeping memories alive for the next generation. "Just as precious oral literatures and histories of whole communities are being lost the world over through rapid change, migration, language death, and a failure to ask, there is a risk that your family’s personal stories, too, will be lost forever," Keating writes. "Your parents and grandparents have unique snapshots and memories of the world they knew, and in learning about them, you can not only preserve the past but also create lasting meaning and connection. In families and communities, there are secrets to be discovered."

Mystery of a mountain people's racial heritage may be solved, at an interesting time for America

Among and along Appalachian ridges and valleys in Tennessee, Virginia and other states is the ancestral home of a mysterious American people, the Melungeons. The dark-skinned mountaineers were whispered to be gypsies; others believed them to be descendants of Native Americans or of ship-wrecked Portuguese sailors. Though the history and settlement of the Melungeons in the Appalachian region is still unclear, the mystery their racial makeup has been solved, and at a propitious time, writes Andrew Miller of The Economist.

The name Melungeon may come from the Greek word melas, meaning dark or black, or early French settlers use of the word mélange to describe them, but the name soon became a racial slur. Melungeons were no strangers to prejudice or segregation, and their ill treatment is a plausible reason as to how they settled in and around isolated Hancock County, Tennessee, 200 or more years ago. The county was, for the most part, outside the grip of Jim Crow laws.

Kathy Lyday, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has researched Melungeons appearances in periodicals and literature for the past century. She spoke with Dale Neal from the Citizen-Times in Asheville about seeing Melungeons in newspapers as a child. "Melungeons are clearly not like the mountaineers I knew," Lyday told Neal. "They look different. They have darker skin, darker hair and blue eyes. In older photos, their physical appearance looks almost Mediterranean or Middle Eastern."

Researchers have re-defined Melungeon as tri-racial, theorizing that they are descendants of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. In 2012, however, the Journal of Genetic Genealogy released a DNA study that reported families historically called Melungeons "are the off-spring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin." Today, Melungeons stretch across East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and into areas of Eastern Kentucky.

At a time when mixed ethnic backgrounds are becoming a more comfortable topic of conversation, emerges a peculiar people who can declare they do not have the racial identity of one-half or one-third of an ethnicity. Melungeons can identify, rather, as wholly sub-Saharan African and European. The "invention" of the Melungeon race and the unraveling mystery of their origins bring new clarity to a muddy and infamous past of race relations in America, Miller writes.

"There may be a deeper honesty, and a kind of idealism, in this voluntary embrace of a mixed-ethnic background—a make-up common to millions of Americans, but which many remain reluctant to acknowledge," Miller writes. "And there is something optimistic and timely about the vision of race that the Melungeons imply. These days, on university campuses and beyond, the old, humanistic faith that everyone is the same at heart has been ousted by an essentialist idea of black- and whiteness, which sees the experiences of each as distinct, even mutually incomprehensible. The grievances that underpin this attitude are often legitimate, but the result is that race in America can sometimes seem like a prison. The notion of racial categories as fluid and optional, even invented, is a refreshing counterpoint to this ossifying sense of unbridgeable difference."

Genealogy teaches rural towns as well as families

Julie Ardery of the Daily Yonder studies a special kind of rural resident who studies the past. Genealogists are committed to not only saving family histories, but also to detailing the history of their communities. (Bill Bishop photo: Family scrapbook of Lucille Skarpa Rohan)

In Fayette County, Texas, a cluster of families share a Czechoslovakian heritage that is being slowly uncovered by T.J. Slansky. In Middlesboro, Ky., Marsha Bratton is piecing together the history of the Cumberland Gap, "where many pioneers (including Daniel Boone) ventured through the Appalachian Mountains." Tina Martinson Ordone, now living in Rayne, Louisiana, has created a world-class genealogical website for Stephentown, New York, where five generations of her mother’s family lived, writes Ardery.

Ordone said, "Genealogical research tends to bring small communities together, in that the discovery of mutual ties will bond people." She said that the Stephentown Historical Society has saved an abandoned Methodist Episcopal church (c. 1870), which now holds its library, and has restored several old cemeteries in the region. Marsha Bratton, of Middlesboro, believes genealogy brings history to life for children. She advises parents, "If you know that your great-great-great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, tell your children that." As Ardery adds, "Without rural genealogy expertise and local centers for its dissemination,  those 'family connections' will likely become more and more tenuous as time passes." (Read more)