Looking for answers

A recent article I wrote about the AhNiYvWiYa Tribe of American Indians based in Grassy, Mo., got me thinking about heritage.

The article focused on the group's ancestral language, but it also cited people who question whether the tribe is a legitimate one.

After the article ran, tribe members were understandably upset that their bloodlines were up for debate. They've written letters to the editor saying the report was unfair.

American Indians, they said, were discriminated against for centuries and thus concealed their identity. This is why so few today have any documentation to prove native bloodlines. This is also why so many of their descendants appear ... ahem ... white.

Fair enough.

But I wonder why it touched such a nerve. Why do so many of us meticulously look into the past and why are we so vindicated or horrified by what we find?

My own grandmother started doing serious genealogical research after her 60th birthday. Frail and living with the aid of a dialysis machine, she did research the hard way.

She climbed the steps to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and hauled dusty tomes to the copy machine. She poked around the National Archives and wrote letters to far-flung places like Nova Scotia, Wales and Ireland.

Her persistence was incredible, and after about 15 years she had enough for a book. With the help of my aunt Barbara, she produced a bound volume with pictures, citations and research going back hundreds of years.

The stories were gripping.

One ancestor was the first woman to lead a wagon train successfully across the Oregon Trail. Another was a speculator in the gold rush finding $10,000 worth and then, promptly, dying. Among our ancestors my grandmother found successes and busts. She found heroes and scoundrels.

The research was what my aunt says "opened up her world." Grandmom kept up relationships made during her search and uncovered distant cousins who turned into lifelong friends.

It was also therapeutic.

Having lost her own parents to pneumonia when she was 12 years old, she was forced to grow up quickly. Genealogy connected her with the past and let her savor the family who had been snatched away.

But I recently discovered there was one ancestor she left out.

In the early 1800s her great-great-grandfather, James Wiley, married a girl in Chazy, N.Y. Grandmom could never confirm the girl's name, but said all the records pointed to the fact that this girl was an Abenaki Indian.

In the end she elected to leave this girl's identity out of the book. She just didn't have the hard evidence to prove it and was too meticulous to bend the rules.

Still, it captured her imagination. I remember her musing about who this girl was and what caused her to marry a white man. It was like she was pondering a piece to some long-forgotten puzzle.

In the end this and other discoveries didn't change anything. Identity isn't built in a day and takes a good deal of effort to be shifted. My grandmother was strong-willed long before she ever found she was genetically predisposed to it.

In genealogy I guess the trick is finding space to incorporate both the old and the new information. The smartest researchers don't go digging around the archives looking for self-worth.

TJ Greaney is a staff reporter for the Southeast Missourian.