Katherine Willson | Knowing Our Family History Changes Our Perspective of the Present

Stories in Our Roots Katherine Willson | Knowing Our Family History Changes Our Perspective of the Present

Episode 6 • 33:34 (edited for clarity)

SPEAKERS Heather Murphy, Katherine Willson

Stories in Our Roots [00:03]
Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots Podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today. Discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connect deeply with ourselves, those we love and the world around us.

Heather Murphy [00:26]
Welcome to Episode Six of Stories in Our Roots. I'm Heather Murphy. In this episode, I interviewed Katherine Willson. I met Katherine as she launched the Virtual Genealogy Association in 2018 and had the opportunity to take a class from her earlier this year on how to become a more effective teacher while giving presentations. Katherine has a gift for making a person feel like they are her best friend and I enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about her and her genealogy backstory. Here is the interview with Katherine Willson.

Heather Murphy [01:02] Thank you so much, Katherine, for joining me today. I am excited to hear what stories you will share with us. Could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Katherine Willson [01:14] Sure. Let's see. I am 52 years old, I'm married. And I identify first as an Army wife before I identify as a genealogist. My husband's been in the military for 37 years, I think, he joined when he was 17. He joined the Army Reserve, and he continues to serve and people hear Army Reserve and they think it's, you know, like one weekend a month or something. But it's more like 20 hours a week that he puts in. He's the Command Chief Warrant Officer for the 200th MPs, the military police.

[01:48] So I love being an Army wife and I'm very involved with Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program. It's a program where we support our military members who are in the deployment cycle. So if they're about to be deployed, the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program will bring together the military member and their loved ones and talk about what to expect during deployment. And we talk about what kind of resources we can offer during the deployment. If the military member is already deployed, we check in with their loved ones. We make sure that spouses, girlfriends, fiances, children are all being taken care of.

[02:23] And the part that I love the most, and I think it's probably the most important part, is the reintegration period. So when the military member comes back, it's really hard for the whole family to readjust. It's, you know, you've had the spouse or the fiance, or you know, whoever's in charge of the house while the military member is gone, they've taken care of everything. For a year they've been the only person taking care of everything. And now you've got a military member coming back in trying to find his or her way, and the person who was at home keeping the home fires burning they're like, "Hey, I did just fine while you were gone. I can keep doing this." and it's a really hard time. I got involved with Yellow Ribbon because my husband's had multiple deployments and I found that the reintegration part was the hardest part. And once people started talking about this program they were putting together, I thought, "I'm in, I am all in." So, so even though genealogy is my full time occupation, I identify first as an Army wife and I really enjoy working with the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program.

[03:24] So we don't have any children. I have a little dog. His name is James. He's a little miniature Beagle, Jack Russell. We recently moved out into the country and I am loving it. I've only lived in the country for like, eight weeks, maybe. I came from the suburbs and I am absolutely loving it, taking my dog for these long walks down the gravel roads and looking at the cows and the goats and the sheep and everything that I always dreamed of. So, so that started me in a nutshell right now in 2020.

Heather Murphy [03:53]
Great, thank you. Now can you tell us how did you start becoming interested in researching your own family?

Katherine Willson [04:02]
Yeah. So when I was younger, and I forget how old you are, when you're in Junior Girl Scouts, I think it's like seven, eight or nine, something like that. I was really hyper competitive. And I wanted way more badges or patches or whatever they're called, than all the other girls. And I didn't want to have to wait for our weekly meeting where I would work on whatever patch or badge that the Girl Scout leader said we had to do. I wanted to work on my own just so I could get all these badges, more than anybody else. And so I asked my parents for Christmas to get me the little Girl Scout book that had all the patches in it, and it talked about what you have to do to earn them.

[04:43] And there was one at the time it, I think it's a retired one now, but there was one at the time called the My Heritage badge. And it was really easy to get you just had to interview a grandparent and then you had to make a three generation chart, so yourself, your parents and your grandparents, and you just fill in birth, marriage, death, dates and places. So really easy to do. And that meant I'd get another badge all on my own really quickly.

[05:10] But when I was doing it, I had to interview so I interviewed my grandma. She was the only grandparent that was living at the time. And when I asked her what the name of her grandmother was, she didn't know. She only knew her as Grandmother Sample. She didn't know what her first name was. And I thought that was the weirdest thing. Like how do you not know your grandma? How do you not know everything about your grandma? And of course, that was me as a child because I knew everything about my grandma, right? And I was just so puzzled and I said, "Well, Grandma, I'm gonna learn everything there is and I'm gonna tell you what your grandma... all about your grandma."

Katherine Willson [05:48] I was pretty precocious. I'm sure I was annoying, but I got really into it. And I was very nerdy. I was just this nerdy little kid that loved to go to the library and all the librarians knew me by name, and I knew them by name. And I had some librarians in the town that I lived, who would help me figure out how to do genealogy. Now, this would have been, you know, if I was eight, this would have been in the 70s, right, the mid 70s. So of course, no internet, I was writing letters and sending away envelopes and waiting forever, three weeks, six weeks for responses to come back. And I just remember how proud I was when I had the information on my grandma's grandma. And I think that sort of lit a fire in me where I was just so excited about well, what else does nobody know? And can I find it out? Am I gonna be the one that shares that information with everybody?

[06:39] But then, you know, then you get older and then you get to be a teenager and you have other things that are more important, like, I don't know, at the time, it was probably like The Monkeys or whatever, you know, the Partridge Family and makeup and clothes and stuff like that. So I didn't really pick it up again until after college when I was In college, I wasn't doing anything genealogy related. But I did have an aunt who passed away on my mom's side and an uncle who passed away on my dad's side while I was in college. And their families knew that I was really interested in genealogy so they gave me all the stuff that this aunt and this uncle had accumulated so on both sides of the family. It came to me right before I was getting ready to finish college. So it was perfect timing because now I'm done reading all these that you have to read because you're in college and I can do fun stuff again. And so I picked it up and then I started teaching it and I love it. I just love teaching people to connect with the things that are important. You know, like you and I were talking earlier about what's really important in life? Is it really about chasing the travel opportunities or chasing the bigger pay? What's really the most important thing? And I think that's what I love about genealogy is I connected at such an early age with the joy in it, and I still feel that joy.

Heather Murphy [08:04]
Have you seen as you've gone through the years that you researching your family has connected you more with your living family?

Katherine Willson [08:13]
Yeah, I have, but probably not like in the typical way that people think of. So I, you know, families are complicated. Families are complicated and people struggle with different things. And there's a lot of sadness, I think, and sorrow with a lot of my living family members, some struggle with addictions and mental health issues and regular health issues, alcoholism. I mean, it's rife with a lot of dysfunction and a lot of struggles. And I don't think I understood where that was all coming from. I didn't really understand how people get to the place that they get in their life and get stuck until as an adult I really started diving more into the stories of my ancestors.

[09:10] So you know in genealogy that sometimes there's a race that people have to how many people can you fit in your tree? Or how many birth marriage death dates do you have? But it's when we start digging into the stories like what was going on in their lives, right? Like, yeah, we have the birth date, and yeah, we have the death date, but what was going on in between? What things were happening? And I was able to really do a lot of research on my grandparents and my great grandparents and look at how hard their lives were and also how difficult their relationships were with their parents, you know. Finding things like letters and journal and things that might be written on the back of a photo, newspaper articles that I had found for various events, some happy, some sad.

[09:59] And I was able to put together, again because I'm an adult now doing this, I was able to put together this explanation of why so many in our family are struggling, you know, that it's that there's inherited pain. And that the inherited pain is coming sometimes because of how they were parented, or maybe all that they were exposed to. And so I had a deeper appreciation for the fullness of them as humans, right. Like, like we think about when we grow up and we experience our parents, we were experiencing them as children, right, and we're experiencing them related to how they have parented us. And if they have flaws, we try to come up with excuses or reasons in our brains with how these flaws came about. But we're coming at it from a child's perspective. And so I was really thankful that as an adult, I was able to look at this and go, Oh, this makes so much sense. I can see patterns of abuse, whether it's spousal abuse, child abuse, alcohol abuse, a lot of neglect, I could see in generations. And it helps to explain how people reach a point in their life where they're sort of beaten down, or they really aren't... They're just doing their darndest just to survive, right, just to make it and they don't really have a lot left over. And that was so insightful for me.

[11:30] And I think it also, surprisingly, that gives me strength. Like when I look at that I can think to myself, wow, look at what I come from. Look at what these people have had to endure. And they continued to endure and their lives were hard and they were surrounded by people who weren't supporting them or weren't loving them and weren't lifting them up. And yet they still, every day they showed up, they did their job. They tried to do the best that they could with what they had. And there's something so inspiring about that.

[12:05] Because you, you know, you, I think it would be really easy to get caught in a trap of, Oh, you know, this bad thing happened and that bad thing happened and that there were all these bad people and oh, poor me. But there's another path that you can go through where you can go, wow, people are just doing the best they can with what they have. And they're trying so hard to to rise above and for whatever reason, they can't and but they still keep trying. And that I feel like that gives me a resiliency. You know, so like when something happens. So you and I were talking earlier on before we started about how I'm, the new house that we moved into, we don't have internet access, and it's like such a crazy thing to think in today's day and age of access. And I think something like that could have totally freaked me out and I would have been, "Oh my gosh, now do I do? I don't have Internet access!" Well, my ancestors, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they struggled with things that were so much harder than that. And they still got through the day. They got up in the morning, they milked the cows, they worked the fields, they did whatever they could to put food on the table. And so there's a lot of resilience that we can take in ourselves when we look at the stories that way. Instead of looking at stories and going, "That's so awful." You know, you know, what I mean? Like, I just think the resiliency speaks to me, it really does.

Heather Murphy [13:35]
And I think that's beautiful, because it doesn't have to be all happy stories for us to gain something from learning our ancestry.

Katherine Willson [13:43]
Not at all, it really doesn't. And I think that when we see advertising, whether it's on TV, whether it's on the internet, in magazines, we see advertising about genealogy, and oh, you're going to connect with your ancestors and you're going to feel this connection and your it's gonna be all rosy and happy and flowers and sunshine and rainbows. But sometimes it's not, right, sometimes it's not like that. But that doesn't mean that isn't worth digging and doing the work, right, and still doing the research. Because in a lot of instances, it helps us to better understand ourselves and the people around us and other than the flowers in the sunshine is to have a deeper understanding of where I've come from and what I can, what I can accomplish because of where I've come from.

Stories in Our Roots [14:36]
This episode is brought to you by my premium service Stories in Your Roots. Many people wander the internet hoping to come across information that will tell their family story. And while technology has made records more accessible than ever, wandering the internet will not provide the answers you are looking for. You need to know what questions to ask, where to look for the answers and what to do with the information once you find it. To learn more about how you can have a family history coach help you maximize your discoveries go to heathermurphygenealogy.com/coaching. That's heathermurphygenealogy.com/coaching.

Heather Murphy [15:07]
Would you share now some of the stories or some ancestors that you've connected with that have had an impact on you?

Katherine Willson [15:16]
Yes. So I think it was when I was researching my immigrant ancestors, both on my dad's side and my mom's side. So on my dad's side, my immigrant ancestors were German and they came into the US in the 1850s, the mid 1850s. And then coincidentally, also on my mom's side, they were English, so they came into the US from England around the 1850s. Both sets of these ancestors from these two different countries left a lot of records in the form of journals, diaries, photos that had been labeled, and also just the record sets that I was able to get a really clear picture of what this immigration experience was like for them.

[16:03] And I get teary, teary eyed, I choke up when I think about this. And I think it's because when I think about what they had to do, to immigrate to this country, and first their motivation, right, the motivation is that their lives are super, super hard in their home country. There's poverty, there's really not much of a chance to escape that poverty if they stay. And their only hope is to get somewhere better so that their children and their grandchildren can have a better life. And so I think about I, I take all this research that I've done, and then I learn as much as I can about the whole 1850s travel, immigration. They had to sell everything they owned, anything that they couldn't bring with them to the new country they had to sell. So even if they had this, like super, super tiny modest home that barely provided enough cover from the elements, right? They still had, they had to let that go. They had to let go of anything that they couldn't carry with them on this journey. So they're saying goodbye to the people that they know the only people that they've loved the land that they've known, non essential stuff.

[17:19] And then they have to travel to the port where they're going to catch the ship. And there's a long journey from where they live to where the port is to get on the ship. So they're having to sleep outside as they're traveling to get to the port. There's people who are out to steal from people who are sleeping outside as they're making the journey to get to the ship. And then you actually get on the ship and I was reading... One of my ancestors had a journal that they talked about what it was like on the ship. And then I was also reading other books that talked about it. It never really occurred to me that you have all these people who are from different parts of the country coming together to board a ship so not everybody speaks the same language. And even if you speak the same language, you don't have the same dialect.

[18:05] So you're on a ship for a few weeks up to a couple months, with people who may not speak the same language as you. You've got children who are probably crying all the time, because it's a miserable journey. It stinks. Nobody's cleaning up the ship, the part that they're staying in, it stinks. There's not enough food, the food that you are getting is rancid. And you're going through all this because in your mind, you just want to get to a better place for your children and your grandchildren.

[18:35] And so you come into the country, and this is especially true for my German ancestors, you come into a country and you're faced with this anti-immigrant sentiment. Because you're German it's assumed that you drink a lot and you probably are lazy, you are poor, so you've got that stigma over your head and you're settling in these tenements until you can get to a place where you have enough money to get land. And that whole experience that just sounds miserable.

[19:04] Like I think I think to myself, you know, when we take a flight, I'm in Michigan. So let's say I get on a flight in Detroit and I'm gonna fly over to Washington or something, and the flight's delayed. So you're sitting in the airplane on the tarmac for like an hour or something because the flights delayed and babies are crying and you're thinking, "This is so awful. The flight, I'm trapped here on this plane for a whole hour." And our ancestors did that for weeks, for weeks. And then you get to your final destination. And for us, if we're flying somewhere, usually there's something fun at the other end, but our ancestors get off the boat, and it's just more hardship and more poverty and food insecurity. And again, all that anti-immigrant sentiment.

[19:51] I wouldn't be here today, I literally would not be talking to you today if my ancestors didn't go through that with this idea that their children or their grandchildren, were going to have a better life. So, so what that I don't have internet at my new house, right! Like my ancestors went through so much worse than that. And I'm here today because they did. So I can get through this. I can get through a pandemic, none of us are able to visit our friends because of this pandemic. But so what? My ancestors went through so much worse than that. And in some ways it helps explain why then some of their descendants really struggled in the world and had such a hard time and turn to drugs or alcohol or battled mental illness. It reminds me that, "And still, we continue and still we go on." And we get up the next day and we do it again. And we can because the people before us have done it and we got to this place because of them.

[20:53] So if I ever feel like I want to have a little pity party, I'm like, you know what, my great great, great grandma is probably looking down right now going, "Girlfriend, you get up off your butt and you go do this because I did X, Y and Z, you can go take the trash out to the curb in the middle of winter or whatever, right?" I'm just mentioned some weird thing, but I just, I pull so much strength from this idea that I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for what they went through, and they did it. So the least I can do is I can keep doing it too.

Heather Murphy [21:27]
Do you have any experience with you knowing who your ancestors are connecting you to different people or to different groups that you wouldn't have had that connection with had you not known your family's past?

Katherine Willson [21:41]
I think that just in general, I tend to be somebody who feels...sympathy doesn't feel like the right word. I feel drawn to the experiences that are happening today with a lot of the immigrants who are trying to get out of really horrific experiences to get to a place of safety. It would be easy to be afraid of them because they have experiences that are different than I am, maybe they speak a language different than I do, would be easy to default to that of, oh, they're gonna come take our jobs or whatever, you know, whatever the people are saying about immigrants.

[22:18] But I feel a sympathy but also I feel what's the word... I, it's hard for me to imagine that any of us if we are facing such poverty or such food insecurity or the political strife that are, that's going on in some of these countries that the immigrants are trying to get out of, it's hard for me to imagine that there isn't anyone among us who wouldn't do the exact same thing if it meant that we could get our family to safety. If it meant that we could take our families to a place where life is going to be even a little bit better. Even if they're still going to struggle. It's still going to be a little bit better.

[22:57]  And so I don't I don't judge the immigrants who are coming in to the US illegally, I just feel like you or I, or anybody we know, if we were facing the same things that they're facing, we would do whatever it took to get to a place of safety, even if it meant breaking the laws. You know, when I was researching the immigration stories for my ancestors, if my German ancestors who came here, if they hadn't fulfilled their military service, they wouldn't have been able to leave the country. So some of them left in the middle of the night so that they could travel through forests or through the water. So they're breaking the law, right? They're breaking their laws of their country, to get to a better place of safety. And I think we would all be hard pressed to say that we wouldn't do the same thing if we had to, to get our family to safety. So I don't want to say that I can relate to the people who are immigrating here to the US because I've not personally been in that situation, but I have a lot of empathy because I can think about what our own ancestors went through.

Heather Murphy [24:04]
So you have a different perspective than you would have otherwise.

Katherine Willson [24:08]
I really do. And I don't, I have a lot of family who do not share my thoughts at all. But I think it's because they haven't immersed themselves in the stories of our own ancestors. It feels like if they read all this or done this research, they would also see this bigger picture. And so I'm so thankful for genealogy for giving me, I feel like genealogy allows us to be more compassionate, because we read stories of so many different people in so many different circumstances. And we read it without judgment, because we're trying to just get a better understanding of what they were going through. And I'm so thankful for that point of view. I really am. And so yeah, I think because I can say because of genealogy my perspective is different because of the stories that I've read.

Heather Murphy [25:00]
I think it's significant what you said that your family members don't have that same perspective. Because you're the one who's doing the work. Even if you tell them the stories, they're not going to have that same perspective because they didn't live with it as they researched it.

Katherine Willson [25:17]
Exactly. And it's so funny like my, my dad and I, we, my dad still insists that our last name, my maiden name was Lange, he still insists that our name was changed at Ellis Island. And I tell him all the time, I'm like, "Dad, this is a myth that has endured, and it didn't happen. Here's why it didn't happen. Let me tell you what actually happened on this journey. And when they got to nobody's name got changed at Ellis Island, right?" And he still argues with me to this day. And it doesn't matter that I know, he has to immerse himself in these stories himself and he needs to see it through our ancestors' eyes and then he can go, "Oh, my daughter was right. Their name wasn't changed at Ellis Island. What else could she be right about?" It, that's all wishful thinking on my part. But it is it's, you know, we we are living the stories of our ancestors, we remember them, we bring them to life. And we remember them through the records and through the writings and the letters and the journals that they leave behind. And that gives us a broader understanding of what people have gone through.

Heather Murphy [26:32]
I agree completely. So for those people who are thinking about researching their family history and learning those stories, what advice would you have for them?

Katherine Willson [26:41]
You know, it's so easy right now for everybody to just go online. And Ancestry spends all this money on marketing campaigns to tell us we should get a subscription to Ancestry. And I'm not knocking them, I love my subscription to Ancestry.com, but we keep getting all these messages to just go on and look up these records. But I want to encourage people instead, if they get a moment, and if they're comfortable doing, I think that you should make contact with a genealogical society and a historical society. Maybe it's the one where you live, maybe it's the one where your ancestors live. Make a connection and ask them what kinds of things do they have in their collection that aren't online? Are there things that you can come and... Now, of course, we won't go visit until after this pandemic is over and it's safe. But can you go in and rifle through a journal that might have been kept by somebody? It doesn't even have to be your ancestors journal, but maybe it's a journal that was kept by someone living at the same time in the same area? Can you look through the journal? Can you read some newspaper articles that the genealogical or historical society has?

[ 27:53] There's something about the tactile, putting our hands on these documents. I mean, I was experiencing this today. I can sit outside a Family History Center with my laptop and try to get a connection, right, as I'm doing my genealogy work. And I was flipping through these pages of a book on my computer. And I just thought, "Oh, I just wish I had this book in my hand, I just want to hold this book and flip through it and, and get this information because it's just not the same when you're doing it online." And I think that's the biggest myth that still pervades the genealogy and family history field is that we can just go online and we'll just complete our family tree. It's all online. Stuff that we want, the really really good stuff, it's not online. We have to make a connection with the genealogical society, the historical society, the library, the archives, the museum, and ask, can you hold something, can you touch it and, with reverence and respect, can you look through this and feel what it would have been like to be your ancestor at that time.

Heather Murphy [28:57]
I think that is beautiful. I haven't ever heard anybody tell that as a first starter tip. But it really does make sense because the internet is so sterile. And it's just data.

Katherine Willson [29:11]
Yeah, it is. And there's something that happens too where we go online... And I'm not saying I don't like it. I love looking at FamilySearch and Ancestry and all the places that we get records. But there's something that happens when we do that, where it's like, like we're growing roots out of our rear end, and we're just sitting in a chair, and now we're glued there for a day or two days. And we just start like pulling a record, pulling a record, pulling a record. And I think it's like if you were sitting in front of a slot machine, right, you just keep putting in the quarters and you pull the handle, and you put in the quarters and you pull the handle and your eyes start to glaze over. And I think that happens when we're doing online research. We're like, oh, yeah, that's my ancestor, click, attach it to the tree, that's my ancestor, click, attach it to the tree and we're doing it with this glazed automative sort of feeling. But when you're sitting with a document, and you're holding it and you're connecting with the story in the past that I think carries so much more weight. I mean, the internet's it's always going to be there, right? Unless you move out into the country, then you have to go to the Family History Center. But it's always going to be there. It's going to be much more rewarding to find out what's not online yet. What can you go see at a museum or at the library at the archives, most libraries have a local history section. A lot of them have things that aren't necessarily bound, but they're loose papers.

[30:39] Here in Michigan at the Library of Michigan in the Archives of Michigan, we have a collection of Civil War flags. And when you're standing in the room, looking at these Civil War flags, which is so different than looking at a picture of them, you're like looking at this flag that went through battle, and you're imagining the person who carried it. I don't know, I just for me personally, I just get so much more emotional and I feel such a greater connection when it's tactile, when I'm touching and connecting with the document or the item, whatever it is.

Heather Murphy [31:14]
I love that advice. It totally does give you a different feeling even just thinking about it.

Katherine Willson [31:19]
And don't you get chills, like just thinking about, you know, the hair on the back of my neck goes up. And I'm like, oh, I just can't wait to get back into the archive. You know, I can't wait. This is all... We're all going through a rough time right now with the pandemic, but it's going to get better. And then we're going to be able to go back to our little happy places and touch these things and connect.

Heather Murphy [31:40]
They're like little time machines because they existed 100 or 200 years ago, and yet they're here present.

Katherine Willson [31:47]
Yes. Right. I mean, it's and I don't get that same feeling when I... You know, I was looking at deeds today for New York. I was looking at land deeds online at FamilySearch. And I'm like, yeah, this is cool. It's naming the person I'm researching. It's telling me some names of people that I'm almost certain are family. But it's not the same thing as when you're standing on the land and you're looking out and you're going, my ancestor looked at this, this was his or her view, when they stood here. They farmed this land. The internet has done amazing things for us for genealogical research but there's really something to be said about the stuff that you can touch.

Heather Murphy [32:27]
Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I appreciate it, at least.

Katherine Willson [32:32]
Thanks.

Heather Murphy [32:32]
Well, thank you so much for your time and sharing your experiences and your stories with us.

Katherine Willson [32:39]
Thank you for having me. This was so fun. I really appreciated that you asked me. You know, I mentioned this earlier, when you and I were talking, I love that you're doing this. I love that you are reminding people of the joy of connecting with our ancestors, not necessarily the research, but the connection when we're reading the stories. So thank you for doing that. That's a huge service that you're doing.

Heather Murphy [33:01]
Oh, you're welcome. And thanks again for being part of it.

Katherine Willson [33:04]
Thanks.

Stories in Our Roots [33:07]
Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing, leaving a review and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback or would like to recommend someone to share their story, head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.