CHAPTER THREE

HEALING:

Finding Grace in Genealogy. Looking to the past for understanding

For many of us who search for our ancestors, we find ourselves discovering events from our heritage that keep repeating themselves throughout our family members’ lives and across generations. Many of these events have become the foundation for our lives in the present.

The expression “It’s just history repeating itself” isn’t far off the mark. These ghosts of hurt, betrayal, lies, and hardships—which defined the lives of our ancestors and the pain that has been carried through the generations—are often embodied in the energy that continues to haunt us today.

Whether it’s addiction, anger, violence, or absence, these destructive behaviors and personal battles can be passed on to you.

Many of the people interviewed for this chapter say they feel it was important for them to confront and try to heal some of the wounds passed down by their ancestors. They felt they had an important role in going through that pain, and not around it, to try to find some healing for the generations who would follow.

Yes, so many family secrets are rooted in shame about issues that define our common humanity, such as infidelity, hidden sexuality, abuse, racial or religious origins, or infertility. But experts say the best antidote is to tell our stories. By doing so, we can heal the wounds for our entire lineage—wounds that have been holding those who came before us captive for years.

The more we look back, the more we find. These lessons can be bittersweet, as out of the pain, we discover our ancestors’ stories of grit, resilience, and the triumph of the human spirit to survive and thrive in the face of adversity. These stories can enrich our lives going forward and give us the strength to know that we, too, carry on our own long and winding roads.

The stories in this chapter show us that there is grace to be found in our burdened pasts, and healing in our futures. When we heal and transform the wounds we carry from those who came before, we are changing the trajectory of those who will come after.

secrets, Lies, and twisted tales: Genealogy bombshell leads to uncertainty about the past and seeking healing for the future

When Rachel read Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro, she was inspired to explore her own family history. She made a beeline to her computer to register with Ancestry.com.

“I wasn’t expecting to discover anything particularly startling,” says the fifty-four-year-old East Lyme, Connecticut, resident, yoga instructor, and owner of Yoga Keeps Me Fit. “My interest was in learning more about the people’s stories and how they might relate to mine.”

Her research dropped a bombshell that changed everything. She learned that her grand father had many other secret families.

But the secrets didn’t stop there.

Rachel discovered that her mother had carried and endured the damage of those secrets throughout her life. Almost as if a lightbulb was turned on, Rachel got a glimpse for the first time into her mother’s erratic behavior.

That trauma had rippled through her grandmother’s, her mother’s, and now her own life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, surfacing in a legacy of loss, lack of affection, hostility, and mistrust.

Rachel realized it was up to her to prevent future emotional damage to her family. To do so, she started unraveling the secrets, one by one. The extent of the delusion and deceit within her grandparents’ relationship was shocking.

Rachel and her family’s story is one of many examples of how the effects of trauma do not always dissipate, but rather can trickle down from generation to generation.

Years before she launched her Ancestry.com journey, Rachel, who grew up in Kent, on the southeast coast of England, was handed a list of names and dates from her family lineage going back to the 1600s by her mother.

She also recalled how her mother had always told her that she was “sure her father was not her father,” because he had treated her so badly. Rachel’s mother told her she had repeatedly confronted her own mother with her questions about her father not truly being her biological parent. Her queries were met with radio silence or, “Of course he’s your father.”

“As you can imagine, this did nothing for their relationship, and [my grandmother] could not admit to having been with another man or her reputation would have suffered,” says Rachel.

Through her research, Rachel discovered her mother’s inklings were correct, and that her biological grandfather had abandoned her grandmother when she was pregnant (or shortly after her mother was born) and then went on to marry a woman in another town. Later, they discovered he had four other marriages, and he was arrested for bigamy and went to jail. Her grandmother then remarried a man “she didn’t truly love and who resented my mother for having to do so because she was pregnant with her.”

As a result of her traumatic childhood, Rachel says her mother struggled all her life with low self-esteem and depression, “which led to us having an extremely difficult mother/daughter relationship.”

“We have undergone years of not speaking,” she says. “During her worst depressive years, she wanted nothing to do with me and disowned me. She unwittingly perpetuated the very situation she endured herself as a child.”

“My grandmother lived in fear of having the truth come out,” says Rachel, which she says is highly understandable considering the cultural climate in the 1940s.

While it took years, and many unsuccessful efforts, for Rachel’s mother to prove her theory about her father not being her biological parent, Rachel’s own internet research was almost instantaneous: the biological grandfather was a bigamist.

Shocked by the extent of the delusion and deceit

“He had been married to five different women,” says Rachel. “His marriage certificates were under variations of the same name. I also discovered amongst my mum’s files a newspaper clipping from the News of the World about his trial and time in jail for bigamy.”

The trail of lies kept going.

“My grandmother hid the truth, saying her first husband [the biological grandfather who ran away] was away at war [instead of telling people he ran away and turned out to be a bigamist], although he was residing in jail,” says Rachel. “Recently I discovered a letter from her to my mother warning her not to dig into the past, her husband had done some ‘silly’ things that should be forgotten, she had worked hard to put the past behind her and would not help bring it to light.”

“After watching the PBS series Mrs. Wilson, where the poor widow discovers her husband had been married several times and had children with each wife, I got a glimpse of how painful and shaming it must have been for my grandmother, especially in the 1940s, when women were totally dependent on their husbands for survival and a good name,” says Rachel.

“My mother believes [my grandmother] found herself pregnant with nowhere to turn except to marry to protect herself and her unborn child, although there was confusion as to who the father was. I feel so much compassion for my grandmother at that time.”

Healing the family trauma

“Knowing my mother’s past, I can see she put so much of her hatred and anger [toward] her mother onto me,” says Rachel.

A mother of two young adults in their twenties, Rachel knew it was up to her to break the generational pattern of hurt, and she needed to try to mend her relationships. “My mother had no role model or confidant and knew no other way to be,” she says.

As a result of these discoveries, she called her mother on Mother’s Day 2019.

“I was anxious about calling, and I was unsure how I would be received or even if she would speak to me,” she says. “I wished her a happy Mother’s Day, explaining my research of our family tree using the information she had given me years ago, and I shared my discoveries of numerous marriage certificates.”

The overture began the healing.

“She was extremely happy I had reached out,” says Rachel. “Her own mother and sisters had always denied the facts, which I would never have found without her detective work years previously. She knew I believed her. It’s sad that such a division existed between the three sisters on this subject—the full truth had been hidden from them as young women.

“I could hear it in her voice, the relief of validation. I know I will never have the relationship that I longed for with my mother. There is, however, a new understanding and forgiveness. I have an acceptance of the past, the sins that were committed, and the love withheld from generations of children that had no voice or protection. I know we both felt a new connection, as if something between us had shifted for the good,” she says.

Despite the painful discoveries, she is grateful she pursued the search.

“I am so glad I had the courage to broach the subject with my mother, and [to have] shared our detective work decades apart,” says Rachel. “She knows I know the truth. My mother’s story is important; all our stories are important. Speaking our truth matters. The truth can and has brought healing to our relationship.”

In that phone call, a rift of a lifetime had been breached, a spark of healing begun, she says.

She also reached out to her cousins, who are her mother’s sisters’ daughters, and shared the truth with them. “They were aware of some of the past—what their mother had dared to tell them. [Our] grandmother had forbidden any mention of it, and once the bigamy story appeared in the newspaper, she never allowed a Sunday paper in the house again,” says Rachel.

“Through one man’s actions, so many were hurt, but through finding and sharing the truth together, we have opened the way to heal,” says Rachel. “My mother and I are now in regular contact, and I have had several letters from her telling me how delighted she is that we are so much closer, that in revealing the truth I have lifted a huge burden that she carried her whole life. This really is a miracle.”

LEGACY LESSON

“This has healed me—knowing that I have learned and understood the truth in our family,” says Rachel. “I have learned how trauma can and has traveled through the generations, and that speaking the truth and owning our stories can heal the past and bring hope for the future.”

She says it has also taught her how to communicate more effectively with her mother and others by setting stronger boundaries for her own emotional protection. And her ancestry search has brought “grace and nonjudgment” to her, she says.

“I can’t be sure that I wouldn’t have tried to hide the truth, either, if I had been in the 1940s with no way to support myself,” she says.

Most importantly, she says that she has learned that kindness and grace are the way forward, especially with kindness to oneself.

“I choose to believe that we are all just doing the best we can in life,” says Rachel.

Making Peace With His Ancestry: common heritage bridges middle Eastern conflict

When Hazem Diab and his family members simultaneously did their DNA tests, they were interested in learning more about their genetic makeup and discovering the whereabouts of relatives his parents had left behind when they moved to the United States from Palestine in 1969. Their inquiring minds also wanted to know where his sisters, brothers, and mom got their blue and green eyes.

The last thing the family expected to discover was that their Middle Eastern ancestors had Jewish ties. The light-colored eyes had their origins in Uzbekistan in Central Asia, which was also discovered in the family’s DNA.

A jovial father of one who is a senior quality manager in Rockford, Illinois, Diab reports one of his family members said upon the revelation, “What do you expect? We’ve lived with Hebrews for many generations.”

Diab shares that his mother, Samira, also expressed much compassion for the connection: “As Arabs and Jews, we all are descendants from Abraham. We have lived side by side, and therefore it is all good.”

Now, thanks to the proliferation of DNA testing, it’s more commonly acknowledged that genetic ancestry connects those involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.

Born in the United States in 1970 shortly after his parents moved to the Chicago area from Palestine to “pursue a better life,” Diab is one of six children. He has studied in and returned to Palestine a couple of times, and he speaks Arabic. This summer he plans to visit with his twenty-year-old son, Tyseer, who is studying conservation biology in college.

Diab believes it’s very important to keep the family heritage from the Middle East alive and is especially excited about showing his family the rich and historical archaeology of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Dubai. His father, Mohammad, retired in Palestine, and “I think this could be the last chance for my son to visit his grandfather there and really soak in the culture and his ancestry.”

The DNA tests the family took that led to the “interesting” revelation was part of a “fun thing we thought we’d do to compare our results at a family reunion we were planning,” he says.

He and his five siblings live in different parts of the country, including Illinois, Washington, and Colorado. They agreed to meet in Oregon “for the DNA reveal,” and each took different DNA tests, including Ancestry.com, 23andMe.com, and National Geographic’s Geno test.

For the lone sister who opted not to embark on the testing, Diab and his siblings had a little surprise. “We told her to close her eyes and reach out her hand. We then put a package of Hebrew National hot dogs in her hands and said, ‘Congrats, we’re Jewish.’”

All in good fun, Diab says. The DNA testing has taught him some important lessons.

“Despite our differences and all the conflicts, we are all really the same,” he says. “There was a Newsweek magazine cover a while back that was a split photo of a Palestinian woman and an Israeli woman, and they looked [almost] like twins. Through our tests, this came to life in my family, how we all are really alike.”¹⁶

LEGACY LESSON

“I learned that it doesn’t matter where you come from—you control the quality of your character. You can’t use the excuse that you have a hot temper because you came from Sicily, or any other stereotype about a nationality or part of the world your ancestors are from. But researching your ancestry can give you closure and help you better understand a little bit more about what the people who came before you had to go through. It’s a funny thing, but I have a neighbor here [in the United States] who I really like a lot and am close to. When he did his DNA, he discovered he has a little part of him that is from the Middle East.”

The Parent trap: Healing the sins of the fathers

Jaimie grew up in a three-generational household with her parents, grandparents, and brother in a small town in Florida. Her family coped with myriad health problems and often chaotic behavior, but she describes herself as “the always-cheerful, easy child, whose needs weren’t as important as everyone else’s.”

A distant, unattached relationship with both her parents has always been very painful for her. But when she started researching her family ancestry through FamilySearch.org, she started discovering clues to the family angst—census records that pointed to a long legacy of abandonment, lies, and emotional deficits.

Jaimie, a blogger and international charity worker, lives in the Middle East with her husband. She developed an interest in ancestry when she and her husband started thinking about having children.

“I wanted to be able to provide a rich tapestry of history for my child, if I ever have one,” she says. “So I started researching my own family tree.”

The surprising documents she found during her search included records of her maternal grandmother living in an orphanage, even though her biological parents were alive; a marriage record of her paternal grandfather lying about his age and marrying a woman she’d never heard of before; and a complete absence of records for her paternal great-grandmother under the name she knew.

Armed with the evidence, she began quizzing her parents about these discrepancies.

No one had ever spoken of them before, but suddenly the stories started to pour forth.

Her paternal great-grandmother was a wild flapper girl who “couldn’t be bothered to take responsibility for raising her son [Jaimie’s paternal grandfather], so he grew up with his grandmother,” she says. “She in turn was a spiritualist, who would communicate with the spirits, conduct strange rituals, and bandage her grandfather’s cuts and scrapes with cobwebs.”

Her grandfather left home early, lying about his age to join the military during WWII and again lying about his age at his first marriage—which she says ended so badly that she never heard about it, despite knowing him very well.

“I always assumed my grandfather was a distant, detached man because he was a war veteran—but this history made me realize his emotional deficit began long before the war,” she says.

On her mother’s side, her great-grandparents had struggled to raise eleven children during the Great Depression. Due to financial difficulties, they placed the youngest children (including her grandmother) in an orphanage. As their financial situation improved, they would take their children home, one by one. But her grandmother was left in the orphanage the longest.

“She carried this trauma with her for the rest of her life, becoming an unstable and detached mother herself,” says Jaimie.

These findings were eye-opening, creating a space for empathy and healing.

“As an adult, I can understand my parents better when I realize the immense challenges of their own parents,” says Jaimie. “My detached dad and detached mom both had parents who didn’t know how to parent them. Understanding this legacy of pain and neglect gives me more mercy and compassion for their weaknesses.”

Although she has discussed the findings with her mother and now has more empathy for the pain her mother endured growing up, she says, “Most of the impact has been on me personally. The Bible says that God visits the mistakes of the parents upon the children unto the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5–6), and nowhere is this clearer than intergenerational ancestry histories. I became interested in my ancestry because I want to have children but am paralyzed by fear that I will continue that chain of neglect and unattached parenting.”

She explains that the Christian scriptures do not depict God as gleefully enforcing generational punishment, but rather that God respects human choices and allows the cycle of cause and effect to be played out in history. “Even though God allows natural cause and effect to happen,” says Jaimie, “I love that there’s always an ‘escape button’ with God. He tells us that ‘The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, and the father shall not bear the guilt of the son.’ If you live a life of faith, there’s always a way to stop that cycle.”

In many ways, the pain she experienced as a child led her on a spiritual path that has inspired the faith-filled life of volunteerism she practices with her husband in the Middle East.

“I was the kid who ended up alone with my thoughts,” she says. “But in my aloneness, I found God was there.”

As time went on, Jaimie developed a desire to follow a career that would prioritize her belief in a divine being who loved her and other vulnerable members of society.

She and her husband moved to Beirut, where, among other things, she taught Bible classes at a private school for Lebanese Christian students and worked extensively in relief programs for Syrian refugees, identifying some of the neediest families and delivering food packages on a monthly basis. Her work with refugees spurred her interest in studying the Arabic language and getting a master’s degree in Islamic studies.

“It helped me enter their world,” says Jaimie. “I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor of dingy basement apartments, listening to awful stories of displacement and vulnerability. It was in those moments of connection that I needed to be able to speak directly to the heart, without a translator, and give spiritual encouragement in terminology that would be familiar and meaningful to them.” She currently is working on her PhD in religion.

Distant connections

Beyond her immediate ancestry, Jaimie is putting together pieces of a more distant puzzle, which she says is a combination of “the good and the bad together.”

For example, her nineteenth great-grandfather, Lord Randolph de Neville (b. 1295), was found guilty of incest with his daughter. On the other hand, her thirty-first great-grandfather was King Charles the Simple of France (b. 879), who was called “simple” because he was straightforward and honest and forged an important pact with the Vikings that ushered in a period of stability for the region.

Her eighth great-grandfather, Teague Jones (b. 1620), emigrated to New England at age twenty-five, married a Native American woman, and is remembered in court records as being an especially poor citizen, often in disputes with other settlers. At around the same time, her ninth great-grandfather, John Greene (b. 1597), was one of the twelve men who followed Roger Williams in campaigning for freedom of conscience in the colonies, later founding the city of Warwick, Rhode Island.

“Being able to step back and get a macro view of the last generations helps me to step outside the picture and determine to do things differently,” says Jaimie. “The third and fourth generation stops here. It stops with me. I think these findings have given me forgiveness for the weaknesses of my parents and more courage to consider parenting for myself.”

She adds, “My family experience made me not want to have children, but after I researched and understood the history of how it got that way, that was when I felt encouraged to at least entertain the thought of starting my own family. Understanding how and why things got that way is what gave me the courage to move past the old mind-set.”

LEGACY LESSON

“Uncovering my ancestry has helped me to cultivate a mind-set of forgiveness and acceptance in a challenging family situation, because I realize that each family member was merely living out the legacy handed down to them,” says Jaimie.

Listening From the Soul: Tapping into your healing story

All of our ancestors have a great story, a treasure for us to find, even when the events are traumatic and painful.

Bad things happen, but wonderful things happen as well, and we have a choice to listen, learn, and grow, says Judy Wilkins-Smith, a Texas-based systemic coach and constellation expert who works with clients to explore hidden patterns and unconscious personal issues in order to surface and heal unresolved trauma in their lives, often from family systems and ancestors. Genealogy sites show where someone belongs in the family tree, and systemic work and constellations help people understand how to use the family patterns to grow.

Generation after generation, our inherited emotional and behavioral patterns can keep showing up in our lives. Subconsciously we carry our ancestors’ pain, language, actions, and even successes encoded in our energy fields, DNA, and cellular memories, which impact our health and our physical and emotional well-being.

Through her work, Wilkins-Smith helps people see these patterns and behaviors and understand what they mean so they can mindfully change their language, actions, thoughts, and feelings and move in a new direction. To do so, she helps people rewire what she refers to as their emotional DNA and change their future. Systemic work and constellations are used by people in their personal lives, and executives in Fortune 500 companies also use them to explore complex issues and facilitate deep insights and breakthroughs, she says.

The way we carry what lives in our familial, cultural, and corporate systems can directly impact whether we succeed or fail, she says. Once we understand what lives there, we can also use this wisdom to create great success. Reframing “what is” into “what’s possible” can often occur with insight and compassion once we understand what happened to those who came before us, or when we begin to move mindfully toward our own fulfillment. Failure to look at the past can result in repeating history. We may then live someone else’s life as though it were our own.

“When we listen to the stories of our ancestors, as painful as they may be, we can create something that is beautiful,” says Wilkins-Smith, who grew up in South Africa.

Start listening to the language of the soul

“Ancestry.com is just the beginning,” she says. “It tells you where you belong, but then you need to discover why that matters. Your patterns often begin in the mouths and bodies of your ancestors, until someone says, ‘I’m changing.’ When they know what they are changing, the shift is even more potent. Understanding how your ancestry matters puts a powerful tool into your hands, once you know how to use it.”

When you make that decision, you become the primary pattern maker. And the more you know about your system and its patterns, the better you’re equipped to create an incredible life and a different path—with acknowledgment of those who came before you.

“Change happens when you look into the face of family struggle and say, ‘This doesn’t work for me. I am changing the trajectory. I am doing this differently,’” she says. “These stories of significant events that happened to our ancestors create the mind-set that this is the truth. But it is not the truth, it is simply our truth, and you can change it.”

Consider a woman Wilkins-Smith worked with who wouldn’t get a driver’s license because she was terrified she might hurt someone.

“She would get to the testing center and then go home,” she says. “She did that five times. When I asked about her parents, it turned out her mother had killed a child who ran out in front of the car. She had never driven again, and now my client was carrying her fears as though they were her own.

“When she could see that the fears didn’t belong to her and leave that with her mother, she could get her driver’s license and along with it the freedom that her mother had given up. She also chose to teach road safety to kids at her local school to honor the child that had been killed,” says Wilkins-Smith.

She helps clients see that they don’t have to stay trapped in past lives of their relatives. “You can tap into the wisdom of your ancestry to start traveling a new journey. Often our greatest pain is our biggest gift.”

Consider the loss of a significant member of your family, or perhaps a betrayal by such a person that spurs you into acting or moving in a new direction. If we look at these events objectively, we might say something like, “Because of this event or loss or betrayal, I did something different. Thank you.”

LEGACY LESSON

“Pain can become a gift, and when we learn to look at our systems in depth, we understand how they are always in service of us. We are indeed living a remarkable life, if only we know how to see it.”

How to Break Multigenerational Patterns

Exercise: Putting Patterns Into Practice

Wilkins-Smith recommends this exercise to recognize patterns consciously, so that we can set down long-held struggles and create success, happiness, peace, and joy.

On a piece of paper, write down the one thing you would like to stop doing or experiencing in your life. Place it on the floor. Notice what you tell yourself and how you feel about it. You might even have a facial expression, a saying, or an action that happens for you as you consider what you wrote. Good. This is the pattern you are trying to stop.

Ask yourself: Are you the only one in your family who has had this experience or habit? Or is it just like your father, mother, or perhaps someone else in the family?

Now write down your heart’s deepest desire or highest wish on another piece of paper. Place that on the floor next to the piece of paper that states the one thing you would like to change. What does that feel like when you compare the two? What do you tell yourself or feel about that? Where do you experience those emotions in your body?

Now compare the two pieces of paper. Notice how close to or distant they are from each other. Ask yourself: How much do I want this goal? Do I really want this, or do I just want to want this? Or am I even allowed to want this? This aspiration or wish is the pattern that is trying to surface in the system through you.

See if you can stand next to the piece of paper with your heart’s deepest desire on it and notice how that feels, and where you feel it in your body. Can your heart open to that desire? If your heart can open, your mind will open, too. Can you take that step and be the change agent, breaking a cycle that no longer serves you and beginning a cycle of growth? That is the chapter that only you can write.

Owning Your story: Overcoming the shackles of ancestral shame

The importance of being thin, pretty, and sexually attractive (but not too much) is just one of the beliefs Karen C. L. Anderson, fifty-seven, absorbed from her mother and grandmother while growing up in the 1970s.

For most of her adult life, she felt hurt and anger toward her mother because she internalized stories like “You’re a pathetic loser” and “You’re not worth anything,” all because she wasn’t “thin, pretty, and sexually attractive enough,” according to her mother’s standards.

She also discovered that those were messages embedded in the psyches of women throughout her lineage.

She knew she had two choices: stay imprisoned by them or transform those messages for her own liberation. She chose the second one, and it became her route to freedom.

Today, she is dedicated to helping women gain autonomy and control over their own lives through revealing ancestral patterns, healing shame, and transforming legacies. In her writing, she challenges the images women have inherited from their own lineages about the way things are and can be for women.

In an excerpt from her blog, Anderson, author of several books on mother-daughter relationships and a master-certified life coach, offers these tips for embracing and telling your own stories—both the internal narratives you tell yourself and the stories about what you envision for the future and would like to see happen in your life.

“It’s important to know what’s your story and what’s NOT your story,” she says. “For example, things that happened to someone else are not your story to tell, especially not in detail. Make sure any details you share are pertinent to the narrative you tell about yourself.”

From Anderson:

• “Like and respect your reasons for telling your story. This is an excellent gut check. The only person who must like and respect your reasons is...you. If there’s any aspect of it that has you NOT liking or respecting yourself, pay attention to that.”

• “Stand on your story (rather than having your story stand on you). This means you’ve transformed your story from being a source of suffering into a source of wisdom. You don’t have to be quiet about what you experienced (in order to protect others), nor are you doing anything wrong by talking about it, especially if you can take responsibility—as an adult—for the way you feel about it. This isn’t a resigned ‘they were doing the best they could’ statement. It’s not about minimizing your experiences. It’s about your resilience.”

“I had a lot of negative stories about my own mother, growing up, and about myself,” says Anderson. “But I have transformed those stories, so that I am no longer a victim to them.”

LEGACY LESSON

“There’s a big difference between having once been victimized and living as a victim. And that difference will inform how you tell your story. How you relate to a previous experience is the difference between living in a ‘less than’ position and living with sovereignty. When you accept (which doesn’t mean ‘like’ or ‘approve of’) your past and everything that happened to you, and everything you made it mean, without shame or fear, you help others do the same.”