In Search of Grandmothers

If you’ve spent any time poking around my website, you may have noticed that I occasionally describe myself as someone who travels the world in search of grandmothers.

I mean that quite literally.

I have crossed oceans, wandered through churchyards, stood in tiny villages, peered at old houses, searched archives, photographed gravestones, and followed roads I would never otherwise have known existed because a woman who lived two hundred or three hundred years ago once called that place home.

Some people travel for beaches. I travel for dead grandmothers.

I have been a genealogist for more than twenty-five years, and somewhere along the way my family tree stopped feeling like a collection of names, dates, and places and became something much more personal. I became especially interested in the women. Finding them is not always easy.

For much of history, women have had an unfortunate habit of disappearing from the records. Not because their lives were unimportant, of course, but because the systems recording those lives often centered men. A woman might appear first as somebody's daughter, then somebody's wife, and finally somebody's widow. Her surname changed. Property passed around her. Newspapers identified her through her husband. Records might preserve the names of the men surrounding her while leaving behind only the faintest outline of the woman herself. Sometimes even that outline disappears, and so I go looking.

There is something deeply satisfying about recovering a woman's name after it has been buried beneath generations of other people's. Finding her maiden name can open an entire branch of a family tree. A marriage record can reveal her father. A baptismal register can reveal her mother. A DNA match can confirm that the paper trail really does lead where you thought it did. Every now and again, genealogy gives you something better than another name. It gives you a place.

That is when I start looking at maps.

I want to know where she lived, what the land looked like, which church bell she heard, how far she would have walked to market, whether mountains surrounded her or the horizon stretched flat toward the sea. I want to know what grew there, what people ate, what stories they told, what frightened them, what they celebrated, and what they believed. None of those things can tell me exactly who she was. I am careful about that. Genealogy has taught me to respect the boundary between evidence and imagination. I cannot look at a village and announce that my fourth-great-grandmother loved the same view that moves me. I cannot turn an ancestor into a character simply because I want to know her, but I can learn about the world that shaped her...and sometimes I can stand in it.

Those moments are difficult to describe.

There is something strange and wonderful about placing your feet on ground where you know your ancestors once walked. The distance between centuries seems to collapse just a little. A woman who previously existed as ink on a record suddenly becomes easier to imagine as a living person who woke in the morning, worried about things, laughed at things, loved people, lost people, got annoyed, made mistakes, grew older, and eventually became an ancestor. She had absolutely no idea that generations later, some granddaughter would come looking for her, yet here I am.

My search for grandmothers isn't limited to my own family, either. Years of genealogy research have made me acutely aware of how easily women's stories disappear and how much patience it sometimes takes to recover them. A missing maiden name, an unidentified photograph, a family story everyone repeats but no one has investigated: these are invitations. They are also reminders that genealogy is never really finished. Every answer produces another question. Every grandmother has grandmothers of her own.

Perhaps that is part of what keeps pulling me backward.

There is an idea at the center of much of my writing that the past is never quite as far away as we think. I don't mean that only in a mystical sense. The evidence is all around us. We carry pieces of our ancestors in our DNA. We inherit their photographs and recipes, their possessions and stories, sometimes their names. We live within consequences set in motion long before we were born.

Then there are the less tangible inheritances: traditions, silences, beliefs, fears, resilience, ways of loving, and ways of surviving that move through families even when nobody remembers where they began. I think that is why finding the women themselves matters so much to me. I don't want them reduced to branches on a family tree or romanticized into a collection of wise and benevolent foremothers. They were human beings. Some undoubtedly endured terrible circumstances. Some probably created a few terrible circumstances of their own. There were loving mothers and complicated mothers, rebels and conformists, survivors and troublemakers. There were women I would probably have adored and women I suspect I would have found absolutely exasperating.

Good. I don't need perfect grandmothers. I want real ones.

So, I will keep following them through archives and cemeteries, across oceans and down roads that don't appear on most itineraries. I will keep searching for the women whose names disappeared between one generation and the next and learning whatever I can about the worlds they inhabited.

There are always more grandmothers to find, and apparently, I have places to go.