The Reluctant Genealogist

By Julianne Mangin

Mom’s stories about her family history were like bursts of steam from a pressure cooker—brief, tantalizing, and, at times, disturbing. She started telling me her disconnected anecdotes when I was about eleven years old. The most frequently repeated story in her canon went something like this:

      My mother had an uncle who set her up in business running a delicatessen. During the Great Depression, the business failed. When I was seven years old, my mother became mentally ill and was sent to a mental hospital. I was taken from my father and put into the county home.

In just a few sentences, Mom would sum up a family tragedy that was Dickensian in proportion: a girlhood weighted down by financial disaster, her mother’s insanity, and separation from her father. When she finished telling the story, Mom would evade the inevitable questions the story prompted with facile explanations and the occasional shoulder shrug. Although she admitted that her father had divorced Grandma while she was in the mental institution and that he had never tried to get my mother out of the county home, Mom professed that Grandpa had been the most wonderful father ever. It made no sense to me.

Mom became interested in genealogy a few years after Grandpa’s death in 1966. Over the years, she worked on it intermittently while she and Dad raised six children. Genealogy didn’t interest me. Looking at the pedigree charts and family group sheets filled out in Mom’s distinctive scrawl, I was unable to make any more sense of the past than I had by listening to her stories. After all the work she’d done, I expected that they would have become more detailed and connected. But Mom continued to tell the same old tales, which were unaltered by anything that she might have uncovered in her genealogical research.

What I wanted was a more coherent narrative of Mom’s childhood. A lifetime of listening to her brief and disjointed stories hadn’t given me that, so I had no expectations of getting it out of genealogy. It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I gave her genealogy a closer look.

In 2011, I retired from the Library of Congress. Around the same time, Mom, then a widow, went into assisted living. The unit was too small to accommodate her genealogy research, which was stored in boxes full of binders and file folders, pedigree charts and census sheets, certificates and photographs. All of that came to my house, where I stored it in my basement, intending to hang on to it until someone in the family expressed an interest in genealogy. But the librarian in me couldn’t resist peeking into the boxes and organizing what was there. I didn’t know at the time that I was on a slippery slope from being a reluctant genealogist to a relentless family historian.

There was something fishy about Mom’s research. For all the years that she’d worked on it, there were surprising gaps, especially regarding events from her childhood. There was nothing about Grandma’s time at the state hospital, except for its name: Norwich State Hospital. After a brief Internet search, I located the hospital records department at the State Archives at the Connecticut State Library and I requested Grandma’s patient record. After proving I was her descendant, I received not only her record, but those of three other women in the family who had been patients there. Following the clues in the records, I was able to upend some of Mom’s stories, especially the one about the delicatessen, the mental hospital, and the county home.

In Mom’s version of her family history, her parents had separated in 1922, not long after they married. However, her father returned, as she put it, “when he found out that I was on the way.” The truth was it was Grandma who had left Grandpa and went to live with her married aunt. They were separated for two years. In 1924, Grandma announced that she was pregnant. Her aunt’s husband—the uncle in Mom’s story—set her up to run a delicatessen where she and Grandpa could live together in the apartment over the deli. The family lore was that they had continued to see each other during their separation.

What I found in Grandma’s patient record was a different story. She told the hospital staff that her uncle by marriage had forced her into a sexual relationship. “He said it was nothing as we were relations and I felt it was the only way out.” The moment I read her statement, I suspected that the uncle might be my mother’s father rather than Grandpa. I surmised that my grandparents were probably set up in the delicatessen to deflect suspicion that anyone else might be Mom’s father.

Mom was born in 1925 and spent her early years living at the delicatessen. During that time, Grandma began to exhibit the psychotic symptoms that eventually got her committed to the state hospital. She laughed and cried inappropriately, accused Grandpa of having sex with other women, and physically assaulted him. My heart went out to my mother—a toddler with a mother whose mind was spiraling out of control.

In 1931, the delicatessen failed. According to Mom, it was due to the Great Depression. Grandma told the hospital staff that after nine years she finally told her uncle she wouldn’t have sex with him anymore. His response? He threw Grandma and her family out of the delicatessen—including the daughter he must have suspected was his own.

Grandma continued to accuse Grandpa of cheating on her. Her delusions about his infidelity were perhaps symptoms of her paranoid schizophrenia. Grandpa, for his part, was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from shell-shock (now known as PTSD). He didn’t know how to handle her rantings or his own violent impulses. Their marriage devolved into physical abuse. In 1933, Grandma told him about the relationship she’d had with her uncle, which meant the violence only got worse. Mom, eight years old at the time, probably witnessed many of their fights. I cringed the first time I realized that she may have heard Grandpa say that she wasn’t his child.

In 1935, her parents had a terrible fight, after which Grandma was sent to the state hospital. Mom was taken away to the county home for her own safety. Until the age of ten, Mom had lived in a household full of violence and secrets. As tragic as this story is, I was glad to learn the truth. Finally, the stories Mom told made sense. Of course she had to insist that Grandpa had been a wonderful father and that it wasn’t his fault that the state wouldn’t let him raise her. To think otherwise would have meant acknowledging the pain of having been abandoned by him. If she suspected that the uncle had been her father, she was dealing with a second fatherly abandonment and a great deal of shame as well. This might explain why she’d been so rigid about the details of her story. 

In July 2013, I sent a sample of my DNA to Ancestry.com to find out who Mom’s father was—Grandpa or the uncle. In April 2014, I got a DNA match that answered this question. Ancestry estimated that this match and I were 1st or 2nd cousins. When I looked at her tree, I saw that her great-grandparents were the parents of Grandma’s uncle-by-marriage. The only way we could be second cousins was if these were my great-grandparents, too.

In her book, The Secret Life of Families: Truth-telling, Privacy and Reconciliation in a Tell-all Society, Evan Imber-Black, PhD, says, “Living with a toxic secret can feel like living in a pressure cooker. The need to tell the secret can build and build until it explodes in an unplanned and hurtful way. Or the secret can leak out through seemingly inadvertent clues that force someone else to discover it.” In Mom’s case, the principal leak in her story was that whenever she talked about her childhood, she never failed to mention the uncle who had set Grandma up in the delicatessen. She never had anything else to say about this uncle. After researching the secret I found in Grandma’s patient record, I realized that the uncle didn’t just set her up in business and then walk away from it. As her boss, he would have been a weekly, if not daily, presence at the delicatessen. There would also have been the times he came to Grandma to demand sex from her. If Mom had found it necessary to erase him from the story of her childhood at the delicatessen, why hadn’t she erased him entirely?

Mom’s insistence on naming the uncle in her story calls to mind Chekhov’s famous advice to writers: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Mom knew, consciously or not, that the uncle in her story held great significance. And because he was always mentioned, it was only natural that this uncle would be one of the relatives whose story I would verify once I set out to explore the family’s past. My research took the proverbial rifle off the wall, and by sharing what I learned, I fired it.

My mother, who passed away in 2017, endured a dysfunctional family and was separated from her parents at the age of ten. Still, she somehow managed to thrive. She earned two college degrees and had a 56-year marriage with the kind of stability that she’d never experienced as a child. It was no wonder Mom always emphasized the importance of education. It had been her ticket out of poverty and dependence on the state. 

However, she was not a warm or emotionally supportive mother. But now, when I look at her family history, I ask myself: What were her parental role models? She had a schizophrenic mother, an absent father, and surrogate parents she shared with dozens of children at the county home. I learned through Grandma’s patient record that she too had a mentally ill mother, a missing father, and had been sent away from the family home. I’m grateful that Mom managed not to repeat this pattern for my generation. She was the best mother she could have been under the circumstances. But there was often tension between Mom and me—tension that might have been alleviated if we’d been able to discuss the family trauma.

Julianne Mangin is a family history researcher, blogger, and former librarian and web developer at the Library of Congress.  Since her retirement in 2011, she’s been uncovering genealogical and local history mysteries. Mangin lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband Bob, an artist. For more information about Mangin, check out her blog.