Getting the Whole Picture

The following is another interesting article written by my friend, Tom Fiske:

Cicero, the Roman statesman and lawyer who lived until 46 BC, was credited with the statement, “The reasons behind the world’s greatest events are often more interesting that the events themselves.” I don’t know what events he had in mind (other than the rise and fall of Julius Caesar) but I am sure he was right. Part of the fun of genealogy is learning why people did what they did.

For instance, I had an ancestor who pulled up stakes in Rhode Island about 1837 and went to Southern Indiana. That’s a long way to go. If you determine that he was restless or depressed because his wife just died and left him with a little son, or that his family lived in Rhode Island since it had been founded and the small size of farms than passed through several generations of division among children, you would be right. But what was really wrong?

What was really wrong was that there had been an economic depression in the works in the Rhode Island area. It had been severe. That is what drove my ancestor out of the Northeast and into the area just north of the Ohio River. He was starting over. The War of 1812 had been concluded and the British no longer claimed the inland part of America for themselves. It was peacetime and a good place for a man to start over.

He started over with a new wife, a nice Rhode Island girl, and lots of new children. It must have been a healthy area, because they all lived. Eventually, his first son, the one born in Rhode Island, went across the Ohio River to Louisville when the Civil War ended where he became a Southerner. A few generations later I grew up in Louisville—all due to the economic depression of 1837 in Rhode Island.

The son of my Rhode Island ancestor died in Louisville about 1914. He had several children, one of whom I knew. It was my Uncle Charlie, who was a riverboat captain. Like me, Uncle Charlie was a tall thin man who told many fine stories about life on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. I told other kinds of stories but have been remarkably like Uncle Charlie all my life. Also I have been remarkably like his brother, my grandfather, who spent much of his life in factories. He owned them. I just ran them.

How much of my life was in my control and how much was predestined by the economic depression of 1837? I will never know, but that depression of 1837 surely played a role.

It’s part of the fun of genealogy—finding out what influenced our past. It is not just the people we came from that counts, but the environment in which they lived that influenced our lives. We miss a large part of our past if we do not look at the environment as we study our ancestors.