Learning Family History Helps You Understand Yourself

More than ever, people are interested in learning their family stories—tracing their family trees, discovering archives, photos, letters, and diaries—and sharing stories with their elders and their children to weave a family story of who they are, where they have been and where they are going. As director of The Family Narratives Lab at Emory University, I have studied family stories for years and have learned just how important these stories are for individual and family functioning. But this hunger for family stories was underscored for me this past weekend as my colleague, Jody Kellas, the Willa Cather Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and I were part of the Impact Forum at RootsTech, the largest family history conference in the world, hosted by the non-profit organization Family Search.

We arrived in Salt Lake City to a bustling convention center, with tens of thousands of people going to lectures and taking lessons on using archives, finding artifacts, organizing material, telling their own family stories, and on and on, with many more participating online. People from around the world came together over a shared interest in family stories. Jody Kellas and I were hosted by Bruce Brand and Star Hall, representing Family Search, who were gracious and attentive tour guides, and we met so many wonderful people who work year-round for Family Search, a free family genealogy search tool, to help people connect to their family histories. It was a whirlwind!

But the true highlight of the experience was learning about my own family history. I knew my family immigrated from Eastern Europe around the time of the Russian Revolution, but I never knew anything beyond my grandparents and, really, only some stories about them. I did not grow up in a storytelling family which, ironically, may be why I spent so much of my research career exploring the benefits of family storytelling.

Family Search conducted a deep dive for me and discovered the names and birth places of my great-grandparents, and provided maps of the cities they lived in and so many documents about my grandparents’ lives: ship manifests, entry through Ellis Island, and U.S. census reports. The physical materials helped me build a picture of my immigrant grandparents, the hardships they faced as the pogroms swept through Russia, the urgent need to immigrate, the long and difficult journey to America, and the work ethic that brought them from poverty on the lower east side of New York City to become successful business owners.

Many of these stories I knew in skeletal form; they echo the stories of so many Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1900’s and so many others as well. More than 12 million immigrants from around the world immigrated through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954, my grandparents among them, most of them escaping difficult living conditions, leaving behind their families and their homes, often never to see them again, in the hope of building a better life.

Family Search helped me create a more embodied understanding of where I came from, and, not surprisingly, this gave me a firmer sense of who I am. My research over the past decades has confirmed the power of family stories—adolescents and young adults who know these stories, the stories of their parents’ childhoods and their grandparents’ lives, both the achievements and the struggles, show higher self-esteem, lower depression and anxiety, and a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life. Even as an older adult, learning more about my own family story has given me a new perspective, a sense of strength and connection.

Jody Kellas and I had a wonderful time at RootsTech, sharing our own research demonstrating the psychological benefits of family storytelling for both individual and family well-being. But at the end of the day, I must say I most enjoyed learning about my own family history, forging new connections to my forefathers and foremothers, living into their stories, and making them my own.