The Difficult Side of Genealogy

From time to time, we come across sad stories in our genealogy.  

Such as my maternal grandmother, twice widowed while in her 20s and married a third time to an unstable ne'er-do-well.  Her first husband's family "ganged up on her," as my aunt told me, and took away her two younger children, her daughters, and adopted them within the family.

Such as a collateral relative in my mother's paternal line, who lost three children in the 1918 "Spanish Flu" epidemic.  Her husband gave her no help at all, perhaps because he was devastated and couldn't handle it or perhaps because he was a jerk.  She divorced him, left Indiana for California and married a doctor there, making a new life for herself.

Such as my brother and his wife, who lost their daughter, my niece, to leukemia when she was 22.  Then, some 20 years later, my brother succumbed to leukemia as well.  I suspect agent orange, as my brother was a VietNam veteran, a Marine.

Such as a favorite uncle of mine, who, after a multiple-heart-bypass, committed suicide.

Handling these sad stories is difficult, when we exercise our empathy, our compassion, and look at them from the perspective of our forbears who faced such heartbreaking events.  Then it happens to us . . . 

Like my brother and his wife, my husband and I are faced with the prospect of losing a child.  Children just should not predecease their parents, but it does happen.  Our younger daughter (52 years old but still our child) has an incurable form of cancer, multiple myeloma.  It is treatable and she is in remission, but this form of cancer cannot yet be vanquished.  Knowing what is coming is like staring down the barrel of a firearm waiting for that bullet to come out and hit us.  

But it enables us to share the grief of our ancestors and relations who went through similar periods of stress, sadness, grief, and loss.  The stories we discover of how our ancestors survived such events in their lives lets us know that, battered and bruised as we may be, we can get through the hard times, the bad times, the sad times, and continue.  We continue to gather the stories of our ancestors and preserve them and the sources that document them, to pass on to our children and make them available to the wider world of family history researchers.