Ancestry Quest

Award-winning journalist Mary Beth Sammons has collected the accounts of people who’ve explored their ancestry, whether through family history, genealogical research, ancestry travel, or DNA testing, and she’s discovered a common denominator among the ancestor seekers. Overwhelmingly, the storytellers find in the discovery and sharing of their stories an experience of healing, a greater sense of wholeness, and a broader understanding of the threads that run through all humanity.

In Ancestry Quest: How Stories from the Past Can Heal the Future, Sammons takes as her subject the growing phenomenon of DNA testing and the passion for genealogical research. She describes the journeys of seekers tracing their bloodlines—their quests to solve known family mysteries, to grapple with unexpected revelations, or to look for knowledge with which to better understand their health. For many of these seekers, she writes, “this process has recast entire lives with surprises including shocking lineages, long-lost siblings, and family secrets that might have been buried for decades. For many, it has opened questions about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Among the story tellers are those who’ve made incidental and accidental discoveries and those who deliberately traced family connections in an effort to solve known puzzles or satisfy a nagging suspicion. Sammons discovered that for most, no matter how shocking the discoveries may have been, individuals move past surprise and even trauma to recognize transformative life lessons.

Excavating the past, Sammons reveals, not only helps people to reconstruct their own family stories, but also to redefine the nature of family and open a new window on the political, historical, and cultural environments that formed our ancestors’—and thus our own—identities.

Throughout, Sammons tells the stories of people who find answers to the questions “’Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I who I am?’”

The answers, almost without except, point to positive, even joyful, responses. Says one of her interviewees, “I always felt like I was such an oddball, but now know the truth.” One seeker observed that having found her biological father filled gaps in her self-knowledge, while one who found a biological sister said the discovery “filled a hole I didn’t even know existed.”

Another describes the experience of unexpected relationships “freeing.” Case in point: Elizabeth Garden, author of the novel Tree of Lives, which features a character drawn to Jewish people in her community who discovers after taking a DNA test that she’s part Jewish. It’s an experience that happened in the author’s own life. After taking the test in search of a Jewish thread running through her distant ancestry, Garden said, “The result was a lot more than a thread —it was  whole new warp and weft in the family tapestry.” The discovery, Sammons writes, “brought her a sense of rootedness within a culture she’d always been drawn to without understanding why.”

There are stories about individuals who discover their older sisters are in fact their mothers, whose fathers aren’t their fathers, whose beloved cultural identities are not theirs through bloodlines, and whose research reveals a cascade of trauma through generations.

Throughout, Sammons affirms the transformative power of storytelling. “Yes,” she says, “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 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.”

Family stories, she insists, can break the inherited cycle of trauma; foster forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding; shatter stereotypes; and lead to a reexamination of assumptions about race.

The exploration of ancestry, Sammons illustrates, is vastly more than mere hobby. It goes to the heart of our shared humanity. “Our ancestors need us to connect some dots,” Elizabeth Garden told Sammons, “and only those of us who listen to their voices can do that.”

—BKJ

Mary Beth Sammons is an award-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen books including Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude and The Grateful Life: The Secret to Happiness, and the Science of Contentment. Her latest is Ancestry Quest: How Stories From the Past Can Heal the Future. She’s a cause-related communications consultant for numerous nonprofits and healthcare organizations including Five Keys Schools and Programs, Cristo Rey Network, Rush University Medical Center and more. She’s been the Bureau Chief for Crain’s Chicago Business, a features contributor for the Chicago Tribune, Family Circle, and Irish American News, and a daily news reporter for Daily Herald and AOL News. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago.