Passing Along the Vision

Here’s another fine article by my friend, Tom Fiske:

Genealogy has given me a lot of fun, but more importantly it has given me a sense of where I belong in the grand scheme of things. And it is not among royalty, either. No, I sprang from a large collection of average Americans, where everyone is royalty, or at least we think we are as good as anyone else. Royalty is a private club of those who are born to it. They can neither get in voluntarily nor can they leave voluntarily. Royalty is a genetic condition that is not always good. Many of the royals were bad politicians. They were so bad that various parliaments have taken away their political powers.

Think about it: would you rather be remembered as King George III (who lost the American Colonies) or would you rather be remembered as Mrs. Rosa Parks (the elderly lady who refused to give her bus seat to a white person)? Surely, one of these two has done more for society than the other. I think Mrs. Parks has a special kind of American royalty.

My son-in-law asked me to help him with his genealogy. His dad, divorced from his mother, died a heavy drinker. He was not well thought of in his family. We got to looking through old records and did not find much. Then my son-in-law mentioned that his dad had served in WWII. Once I had the name of his dad’s Army unit I found all sorts of things on the Internet, by tracing that unit from Casablanca through the north of Italy. He had been in the Fifth Army and I had written a book about the Fifth in Italy called Full Duty, so I knew something of its history.

It turns out that his dad carried a rifle and had been through some of the harshest fighting in WWII. He was in the same outfit that Senator Bob Dole was in, but Dole was blown up and suffered the rest of his life. I thought about the death and destruction that this dad must have been through for four long years, and told my son-in-law, “Your dad was a true American hero.”

“Heroism leaves scars,” I wrote in one book or another. I am sure this dad was not the same person when he came out of the Army that he was when he went in, four years before. He must have suffered all sorts of internal emotional injuries that kept him from living like many other young men of the same age. “Cut your dad some slack,” I told my son-in-law, “Accept him as a war hero injured in some of the fiercest fighting mankind has ever seen.”

Most of us genealogists need tolerance.

Having learned tolerance at an early age, I was well suited for a study of genealogy. Why did I learn tolerance? Well my mother was a Southern Baptist Democrat and my father was a Episcopalian Conservative Republican. Try growing up in a household staffed with parents like that when both were active politically and in their churches. Talk about tip-toeing through the tulips! My two brothers and I had to be careful not to choose sides. We watched and listened to the various opinions they offered without belonging to any of the groups more than nominally.

My father’s ancestors, I later learned, were there when Rhode Island was founded, while my mother’s ancestors were busy in Virginia at an equally early age. Some of them were American Indians, too. Dark skins and tomahawks and all that. But whatever their backgrounds, I found that my parents were both Southerners, so they could agree on one thing besides their love for each other.

“What does tolerance have to do with genealogy?” you might ask. It is just that we are not who we think we are or who we want to be. We are, warts and all, the sum totals of those folks whom we discovered in piles of musty old records. If we want to be honest, we have to accept them and find the good where we can.

Oh, I know, we try to put the best face on what we find, but really, that is just window dressing, pumping up the resume’ a tad. No one is fooled if we claim to be descended from earls and princes and explorers—least of all, ourselves. Down deep, we know we are (most of us) ordinary folks, raw immigrants at one time who may not have made big marks in history by themselves.

But, and this is a big but, together with the rest of society in our area, we formed churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and homes for the poor. We were minor political leaders, ministers, or simply followers of the law, the kinds of people who made this the great nation it became in a rather short time. We were the type of people who “caught the vision” of what kind of place we wanted to live in. Americans had the choice few others in the history of the world have had. We chose to live in a democratic society that we made up as we went along.

Once I asked my mother why people did not break the law and cheat in some obvious way (that a seven year-old could discern), when cheating appeared so easy. Mother said, “I suppose it is because people don’t want to live in a world full of cheaters.” And I think Mother really had a handle on something big. She had “caught the vision.”

We do not have a large number of policemen watching over us because by and large, we are a law-abiding society. That is part of the American ethic. We protect the small and weak, we generally pay our taxes, we pay to attend theaters, and we generally know how to conduct ourselves in stores where a customer takes items from the shelves by himself (in some countries, that could never occur). Nowadays in some stores we even check ourselves out and pay for our purchases without supervision! A democracy won’t work everywhere. It needs a good ethical system to support it.

When I retired from industry, I had too much energy to sit in a chair and rock, so I joined up with the local school district to teach science and math. Having tried all grade levels from 6 to 12, I began to specialize in the seventh grade (I thought about teaching elementary school kids, but I looked at the size of my shoes and decided not. I was afraid I might accidentally step on a second-grader and kill it).

As a fully accredited school teacher overseeing classrooms of 30-36 kids at a time, I began to see where some of our ideas about society came from. It was in the home where societal rules were introduced, but it was in the classroom where they were reinforced. Teachers didn’t just teach algebra, they also protected small kids from the big predatory ones, they frowned on cheating, they encouraged self-confidence, and they showed kids the value of an orderly, ethical society. It was amazing how quickly I fell into the habits my teachers had from fifty years before; those habits were part of my psyche.

And there was one more thing I saw from the head of the classroom every morning: I saw 36 kids of all kinds, shapes and colors. “Here is real Democracy,” I often thought. Every kid is treated the same no matter what. I realized that teaching kids in a democratic society is a rare privilege. So is the opportunity to pass along the American “vision.” We owe our school teachers a great deal.

What will future genealogists find, a hundred years from now? Will they see our lives as brief flashes of history with birth, marriage and death dates firmly attached to our names… and little else? Or will they see our lives as parts of a continuity that gave strength and depth to the fabric of a great society which influenced the rest of the world? It depends in part on what kind of a story we leave them. Maybe we can be anchors that give them perspectives both about their pasts and their positions in the present. I am grateful for the vision that my ancestors left for me.

Thomas S. Fiske
Fullerton, CA
February 20,2010