Gratitude For Our Ancestors

#51. Gratitude For Ancestors

Heather Murphy: Hello, this is Heather Murphy. Welcome to another episode of Stories In Our Roots. It's been a while since I have done a solo episode and I thought it was about time, but I would like to mention that I am thankful for the over 40 people that I have interviewed for this podcast so far, I am thankful for them for sharing their stories.

And as you may be aware, this is November and in the United States, it's a big month for being thankful for showing gratitude. And that's what I'd like to talk about today. And the way that we show gratitude to our ancestors, not just being thankful for them while that is part of it, but how can we show them that we are thankful for the lives that they lived.

And I believe that our spirits don't die when we leave this mortal realm that we continue on, that our ancestors are still living, even if we don't have the opportunity to interact with them. And I like to start off by. Examining what is gratitude? And I found a great kind of definition, by Robert Emmons, who is a psychology professor at university of California and considered an expert on gratitude.

And he said that gratitude has two parts. And the first part is recognizing that good things exist. That there is good out there in the world that it's not all doom and gloom. And then the second part is recognizing that that good comes from a source outside of ourselves. That it's not us that creates all the good things in our lives, but we receive good things from other people, from other places outside of ourselves.

And that went along really well with what I've been learning about optimism by reading a book by Martin Seligman, which is a, another psychologist. And he looks at the rising depression in the world as sort of an effect of society looking more inward and less outward that we used to as a society, believe in things that are bigger than ourselves, such as God, country and family. But now just looking at that family aspect, families don't live close to each other anymore, in general terms.

You have families that are spread clear across the country. You don't have that connection that used to be there within families. It has changed. And so by being grateful for our family, by looking at our ancestors and even our, our living family members and having gratitude for them, for the things which they have experienced in their lives can help us look outside of ourselves and shift our perspective. And maybe brighten our world a little bit and it's not even, maybe it's that there's been studies. That being grateful helps us to be happier people along with a whole list of other benefits.

Now, how can we show gratitude to our ancestors? And one of the things that I think is really big is just remembering them. The other day I went up to someone, an exercise class, I was at a new gym and I remembered her from the old gym that I went to and I went up and I just said, I remember you from the other gym. And she was just taken back that someone would remember her. And I think our ancestors would have that same feeling when we remember them. When we take time to. Remember who they were and the lives they lived, not that they had to do anything spectacular, but that because of them, we are who we are that we even exist.

I've talked about this before about sometimes we get our favorite ancestors and we kind of neglect the ones that aren't our favorite. Oftentimes this is due because there are . Things that happened in the family that caused that rift, or simply because we don't have the records. Another reason that I have found in my life is because I don't relate to them very well.

There are certain ancestors on my dad's side, for example, that I have a lot in common with, but on my mom's side, I don't have as much in common with, so I don't really seek out. To know those ancestors better because they're not like me, but what would happen? What would it mean? How would my relationship with that part of my family change if I chose to get to know them better, if I even just spent time thinking about their lives. And that's something that we can all do, think about our ancestors lives. And that is kind of the second thing. Taking that time to understand our ancestors, maybe choosing one, and thinking about what made their life unique, what were their experiences?

We can look at the data that we have and kind of pull the story out of it. What age were they when their children were born? What age were they when their brother went off to war? What was going on in their communities. Can you find community histories or oral histories of people that lived in that community that might've experienced things that your ancestor did, or even reading books about the time period in which your ancestor lived to imagine what their life might have been like?

And sometimes in family history we kind of, don't want to go there, that imagine thing. I mean, especially me as, as a professional genealogist, I'm, we're all about the facts. Right. But what could we learn about them and ourselves, if we allowed ourselves a little bit of imagination within bounds, you're not going to imagine something completely outrageous that your ancestor, that didn't fit with what you know about them.

But imagine what their life would have been like, how would they have felt during certain things? A lot of times in our research, we're so fast to collect the data and to make the timeline that we don't take the time to think about the feelings that our ancestors might have had. And as we do that, we have the added bonus of learning about ourselves a little bit more as well.

 and as we learn about our ancestors and we take that time to sit and think and examine their lives. It also gives us an opportunity to have more gratitude for the lives that we live. We can see the circumstances that people in different places and times had to live in, and we can have more gratitude for what we have now.

I mean, indoor plumbing is a huge thing for me. What about your ancestors who did not have indoor plumbing? What would that have meant for her life compared to what your life now? I mean, it's a seemingly small things, something we completely take for granted today, but how has that, how's your life different because you live in the time that you do?

 To help you with this process of showing and being grateful for the ancestors that you have. I have put together a little worksheet that I'll have a link in the show notes for. And it's 30 days of gratitude for 30 ancestors.

That is, uh, four generations of your family, your parents through your great-greatgrandparents. For each of the 30 days, you'll just focus on one ancestor and write something down that you can have gratitude for about that person. It can be something that they did that impacted you. It can just be recognizing the life that they lived.

 And for those ancestors that are sometimes really hard to think of something positive about, I'd like to propose that you find something in their life that you can take a positive out of. I was in a business group this last week with Jacqueline Malone.

And one of the exercises she had us do was write a list of 20 things that we were grateful for. But at least five of those things had to be hard things that happen. That we could find some piece of gratitude within it. And I think we can apply that same thing as you look at each of your ancestors through your great-grandparents, maybe it's hard, but what good thing can you take out of it?

That's also something I've learned from other people. You can have these really hard things happened to you or to your ancestors, but what if you take that 1% good and you amplify it?

 Now throughout the interviews that I've done over the last year. So many people have expressed gratitude for different ways that researching their family history and learning about their ancestors has helped them. We have examples of people understanding themselves better, whether they were adopted or whether they just didn't know much beyond their grandparents.

And they were able to feel that thread, that wove through the generations that connected them to not only themselves, but also other people. So many have said that the, one of the big things that they've been grateful for are the increased family connections with cousins that they wouldn't have ever connected with otherwise and that their sense of family has grown as they've made those connections.

Improved relationships, peace of mind and troubled times, finding things in common with groups that people didn't think they had anything in common with. There's so many ways that we can look at our ancestors and find gratitude for.

One of the things that Catherine Wilson said was that her ancestors might not have done anything impressive and might not have lived a very commendable life, so to say but they showed up every day and they kept going, even though things were super hard and sometimes just the persistence to put one foot in front of the other is something that we can be grateful to our ancestors for.

Laura Roselle talked about how her father was cared for by neighbors. His dad was off at the WPA working. His mom was in the hospital with tuberculosis and a neighbor in their apartment building took care of him. And then later encouraged him to go to college and helped him find a scholarship and completely changed that projection for that family. So that's another thing that you can do as well as look for the people that help your family, who did something to help your family when times were tough? And then how can you do that for other people?

There is a scripture at the end of the Book of Mormon that I love when it comes to looking at our ancestors and it was written by Moroni, he's the last person to write in this book and he's reflecting back and he says, "Condemn me not because of mine imperfections, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither of them who have written before him. But rather give things to God that he has made manifest unto you our imperfections that you may learn to be more wise than we have been."

 And isn't that a beautiful thing to keep in mind as we look at our ancestors? Absolutely they were not perfect, but if anything, if we can learn from their lives to make our lives better, what greater gift can we give to our ancestors then improving the generations that come after them.

So many of them made decisions in their lives to improve their lives to as evidence of their hope for something better to come in the future. And a lot of them knew that their work and their choices would be hard for them, but they hoped that they're efforts would reap fruit in future generations. They knew that law of the harvest that you have to plant seeds and sometime down the lot, sometime down the way you will reap the benefits, but it's not always yourself, it's those future generations. And we can look back at the lives of our ancestors and be grateful for them, with all their imperfections. And then do our best to live up to their hopes and be better than the generations before us and lay the groundwork for the generations after us to continue to improve, to continue to live up to the hopes and dreams of people who couldn't live those things themselves, but had hoped for a better future.

You can grab the worksheet from the show notes, if you'd like, and to just focus this next month on showing gratitude for the people who helped you become who you are and who laid the foundation for the life that you get to live.