The question of when, or time in the linear sense (“yesterday”), is vitally important to doing genealogy and family history research. The past is the ground floor of kinship studies: our ancestral roots are living below this floor, ready to be excavated and explored.
However, space, or place, is also extremely important. When we research our ancestors who have “passed” and their “past” lives, we discover how important it is to know something about the specific places where people lived and died. Where was she born? Where did she get married? What places did she live in during her lifetime? Where did she die? Where is she buried?
These are all important questions that need to be answered in the process of doing ancestral research. In my own father’s family history, I discovered that the Pynes family moved from southeastern Alabama to northeast Texas in 1888, taking the train westward. Before Alabama, they were living in Edgefield District, South Carolina.
Although I am still working on figuring it out, the oral tradition in the Pynes family is that we were of Irish heritage in the “Old World.” They may have immigrated to the “New World” from Tipperary in Ireland. It is indeed a long way to Tipperary from Flagstaff, Arizona, but it’s also just a hop, skip, and a jump back to the Emerald Isle from Arizona to Texas to Alabama to South Carolina and probably Virginia.
Sound familiar, perhaps?
My mother’s ancestral roots also go back to South Carolina but that branch of the family got to Texas via Arkansas, rather than Alabama. Amazingly, as I discovered, both branches of the family moved to Texas in the same year: 1888. 101 years later, I was “back east” in Rockford, Tennessee, about to get married and then to have three daughters during the 1990s.
These are the kinds of interesting and even profound insights and information that we find when we start closely examining where our ancestors lived and where they came from.
As the Navajos of the Southwest have taught me, the question of where you are from (Haadeesh nanina? “From what place are you being?”) is a profound one. That’s because if we know where we are–and where we were–then we begin to know who we are. My research has shown me that although my mother and my father and their ancestral families are profoundly different from one another in many ways, “I am being from” at least two important places that their ancestors shared in common: South Carolina and Texas. In a time of extreme cultural and political polarization, that common ground is a gift that must always be remembered.
What about your ancestors? Where are they from?