Hugged by Ancestors

I made a reference in a previous blog about feeling hugged by my ancestors when sitting among my grandparents scrapbooks, photo albums, journals, etc., when I was 16 years old. A new found friend on GenealogyWise emailed me and said he liked that phrase, "hugged by ancestors." A few of the back and forth emails had the subject line "Hugged by ancestors," and I have not been able to get this phrase out of my head since.

As I pulled a few different genealogy files out today to look up information on different surnames I again felt like I was being hugged by my ancestors. Anytime I work on my genealogy I feel this way. My heart fills up with love about people from the 1800s I have never even seen a picture of, let alone know all of the information about them. Just knowing that these names are my family though is enough for me.

I think this overwhelming feeling of love is why I am "obsessed" with genealogy. I believe it's why I will spend hours researching, only to look up at the clock and wonder how five hours passed so quickly and wonder if I ate anything that day. Being so wrapped up in a good find that my leg is bouncing almost through the floor with the urge to...let's say "powder my nose" to show that I am a lady. I know that you understand what I am saying. The same happens to you. That's why you are on this site, reading this blog. Something inside of you stirs your very soul to know more about the names you know and the ones you have yet to know. And when you, like me, are surrounded by genealogy material you feel an overwhelming amount of love and respect unlike anything you have felt before. Only a genealogist understands this. We are so lucky to have found something we can be so passionate about that connects us to our past and the history of our world around us.

But what if we find something about our ancestors that causes us to take pause about our ancestors. A non-genealogy friend and I were talking tonight about genealogy. I was telling him how great genealogy was that I could learn more about history while researching my relatives. We discussed the different wars America has fought and the relatives who fought in these wars. He said to me that when he was a child, born and raised in America, he would see World War II movies and always root for America and have so much pride. His mother though was born and raised in Germany and her roots are in deep with Germany history. Her family line has known Nazi's, including possibly her own father. He said when he realized one day that one of his great uncles died in World War II in France as a Nazi he felt strange. That great uncle was his family, his blood, but this ancestor was a Nazi, something as an American and supporter of democracy, my friend could not support.

I told my friend that just because we do not agree with what our ancestors may have done with their lives or their political views or idealogies, does not mean we can't still feel hugged by them. They are still our blood, our family. We don't have to be proud of them for fighting for what we might believe is the wrong side, but we can still feel loved by them and get our hugs in.

I have ancestors that did things I am not proud of. Like the great great great uncle who shot and killed his brother over their sister's estate in the San Francisco County Courthouse in the early 1900s. But when working on this family tree I still feel loved and I still feel my hugs. I love genealogy because in all of our finds we feel passionate, loved, and hugged. I for one love being hugged by history, no matter the skeletons I find or the bad seeds. These are my ancestors and without them and their struggles in the time periods they lived in I would not be who I am today.