Genealogy: why is my Irish family so obsessed?

Hi guys, further to my last post about my big Irish family, I would like to pick up on one of the points discussed in that post. I noted that some of the members of my partner's extended family were extremely interested in their Irish genealogy and we did spend an evening going through old photos, talking about deceased ancestors whom we have never met but good grief, they talked about them with such great interest because they are all related. It was stunning how they knew minute details of a great-granduncle who passed away decades ago: they knew where he lived, what his job was, how many children he had, at what age and how he died, even how many divorces he had. That left me  bemused, especially when they started asking me questions about my extended family, especially about my grandparents and great grandparents - questions such as, what job did your great grandfather do? To which I could only answer, "I don't know, I never found out."  I suppose I never took any interest in my genealogy because it just wasn't the done thing in my family - if your parents never bothered telling you about their grandparents, then the information just never gets passed on because my great grandparents died way before I was born. Yet with my partner's family, they knew so much details about all their great grandparents because that information was passed on - sometimes formally (they were meticulous in keeping records) and sometimes informally, simply as topics of discussion when the family sat down and had a chat. I realized I have only a limited amount of time to get information about my great grandparents from my parents before they pass away - otherwise that information would be lost forever since we never really kept records.

I did wonder what my Irish cousins (I use that term loosely to describe my partner's extended family) gained from spending so much time and effort keeping track of their genealogy. A couple of answers that were suggested to me was that it gave them a sense of identity and belonging, they needed to know where their ancestors came from in order to know who they are - it was a conscious choice to base their identity on this information about their ancestors. But this wasn't strictly about being Irish, embracing Irish culture or learning the Irish language, it was more specific about this group of Irish people they were descended from and feeling a sense of connection to them despite the fact that they had passed away many years ago. But why do they want to do this? What is so interesting about our deceased ancestors and how is that relevant to our lives today? Perhaps if you have a certain ancestor who was so famous and successful that they left their mark on history, then you could claim, "I am this famous person's great descendant", people would sit up and take notice if they knew whom this great famous person was. But unless you were associated with a really famous person, like Aretha Franklin or Lee Kuan Yew, then the chances of anyone knowing your grandparents or great grandparents are going to be very slim. And say if I met the grandchild or great grandchild of Aretha Franklin, I would wonder if that young person would have inherited some of the great vocal talents of the great Aretha Franklin since they came from the same gene pool. But even then, I think this kind of "talent by association" is really quite tenuous at best.

I can imagine there is some poor kid in America who is some distant cousin to Venus and Serena Williams being forced to do tennis lessons on the basis of "you came from the same gene pool, so we are going to make a tennis champion out of you!" It doesn't work that way - we're all unique individuals and what talents we ultimately inherit from our gene pool seems totally random. And even if we are blessed with some natural talent say in sports, what you choose to do with it ultimately determines what you become in life. Let's take the case study of Simone Biles - currently the world's best female gymnast. She has well and truly dominated the sport since 2013 winning a total of 14 world and Olympic gold medals, a record she holds in the sport of women's gymnastics and is unlikely to be broken in my lifetime at least. Biles is usually making the headlines for winning yet another gymnastics competition or inventing another crazy difficult skill in gymnastics - but this year, she was in the headlines for a completely different reason: her brother Tevin was charged with murder as he was involved in a shooting incident in Cleveland on the 31 December 2018 in which three young men died. The circumstances of the shooting are not yet clear and will probably only be revealed during the trial but isn't it scary how one sibling can become one of the world's greatest Olympic champions (she's probably aiming for 5 gold medals in Tokyo 2020, one more than the 4 she won in Rio 2016) whilst her brother is likely to be in jail during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, serving a very long jail sentence for murder. Having the right genes is only one small part of the equation, so much of it depends on the choices you make in life that determine whether or not you become an international sports superstar or a convict spending most of his adult life in a jail cell. I certainly hope her brother's trial and sentencing doesn't affect Simone Biles' performance at the Olympics, but as you can imagine, all this must be quite traumatic for her.

Of course, there are so many murders in America all the time, but the only reason why this one made the headlines (whilst thousands others are barley reported) is because the person charged with murder is so closely related to an Olympic champion who is so inspirational, so successful and is a role model to so many. It is the shocking contrast between Simone and Tevin that makes us sit up and think, "what is going on? How can this happen?" Even if you did have some kind of talent for something like sports, you may choose not to pursue it. My regular readers will know that I was a former national champion gymnast and still enjoy the sport today - I have a sister who could have probably done gymnastics but she didn't; she enjoyed watching it but never really had enough interest to want to train the sport. Even today, she jogs regularly and is in remarkably good physical condition. But even if she had any kind of talent or potential for gymnastics, she just wasn't that interested in sports and her interests lay elsewhere. So imagine if we found out that we had an ancestor who was a sports champion back in the 1930s, would it have changed our attitudes towards sports? Probably not. I pursued gymnastics because I liked it, I truly enjoyed it, it made me happy - whether or not I had ancestors who felt the same way about it wasn't relevant to my relationship with gymnastics. This is why I feel that the way I had kept gymnastics as a major part of my life for about 35 years had defined me - heck, even my hotmail address has the word 'gymnast' in it. Gymnastics defines me much more than what I might find out about my ancestors, hence I'm far more focused on the things I want to do rather than what my ancestors got up to several decades before I was born.

As I sat down with my Irish cousins and heard them talk about all these details about what their ancestors did all those decades ago, it was clear that they wanted to remember them fondly - it felt like they were viewing the past through rose-tinted lenses. They described the way they had fled the poverty in Ireland as a heroic act, about how they landed in America with no more than all their worldly possessions in a small bag and started a business with no more than the spare change in their pocket, then after thirty years, they owned a chain of shops in Cleveland and were able to retire with a huge plot of land in Ohio. I suppose it was a process of selective memory - they remembered the most successful ancestors most fondly whilst the ones who were a disgrace were simply not talked about and eventually forgotten. It would be hilarious if they presented a faded black and white photo from the 1930s and said something like, "this is Joseph Flaherty in the photo, he was from my grandfather's side of the family in Ohio. He was a drunkard and a wife-beater, eventually she got tired of him and ran off with an older Italian guy, leaving the four kids with him but he was too drunk to take care of them so they ended up in the orphanage, we have no idea where those four kids are today because the orphanage closed during the second world war and they were never great at keeping records at those orphanages, children were just abandoned there, unloved and unwanted. Joseph had trained to be a blacksmith but he couldn't hold down a job for long because he drank too much. In 1938, he moved to Buffalo, New York after his wife left him but he didn't survived there long, he mostly went out to get drunk almost every night. During one drunken brawl, he was stabbed in the stomach with a broken bottle and bled to death - they never caught the guy who did it to him, his body was found floating in Lake Erie three days later. What a character and what a way to go! That's so typical of that side of the family."

I know the mother's side of my family really well as they are mostly in Singapore (we have some distant cousins in Hong Kong as well), however, I don't know much about my father's family in Malaysia. But even within my mother's side of the family in Singapore, sure we have some success stories about some pretty outstanding people that I would be proud to share, then again we have our share of scumbags as well. I remember this morning when I would have been about 12 years old, my uncle got arrested and my grandmother had called us up in a panic, not knowing what to do. Of course, my grandmother spoke mostly Hokkien and a little Malay and my mother (who spoke English) wasn't home then - so my father spoke to my grandmother and then he called up the police station, only to find that the duty officer there was Indian and of course, my father doesn't speak English. So I had to then step in, act as the translator and speak to the duty officer to find out why my scumbag uncle was arrested, so I could then tell my father and grandmother what had happened. I swear the duty officer was so embarrassed in having to tell me some of the lurid details of what my uncle did that led to his arrest. It was hilarious in hindsight but do I want to record stories like that down to pass onto future generations? Hell no, why would I? That scumbag uncle was a disgrace and I could tell you why he got arrested, but it would be a whole other story that could take up an entire blog post. But whether I like it or not, I am related to that scumbag uncle by blood - he is my mother's brother after all though I have no desire to ever see him or talk to him again.

Is genealogy therefore something people do because they have nice ancestors they can talk about and it becomes a far less enjoyable exercise if you find out that you are descended from scumbags, drunkards, convicts and losers? Well, I suppose if you did look into your lineage and didn't like what you see, then you would have to make sure you focus on making yourself a pretty impressive person rather than talk about some great granduncle who had died several decades ago. But I think that does free you up from another perspective - since I know very little about my genealogy, I am free to choose whom my role models are from the past and present, rather than be somehow forced to pick role models from the small group of people who are related to me by blood. No thank you, I would rather pick any person from the human race, that offers a much wider selection. To be honest, part of the reason why I don't take any interest in my genealogy is because there's a part of me that is afraid that I would probably be rather bored with what I find - they may be just a bunch of ordinary folks leading some pretty mundane lives, being somewhat uninteresting and just plain common. There wouldn't be any inspiring stories to tell, they wouldn't have left any kind of legacy, after they died they would pretty much be just forgotten eventually, even by their own relatives. If there was someone who had achieved something incredible or indeed if I was related to a hardened criminal who was notorious, then perhaps I would be a lot more interested as there would have been at least some fascinating stories to discover about those people. Otherwise, I would rather interesting read stories about people I am not related to, stories from other countries that are fascinating, unusual and captivating. 

In my case, one of the key reasons why I have little interest in my genealogy is because of the massive language barrier - I speak English as a first language, French as a second language and Mandarin is my third language, but my mother barely speaks any Mandarin, her mother tongue is Hokkien and she speaks English along with a little Malay. My dad's mother tongue is Hakka and he is totally fluent in Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese, he also speaks a little Malay. Going back to my maternal grandparents, they spoke Hokkien and Malay and as for my paternal grandparents, it was Hakka and Malay. I am the first generation in my family to not speak an Asian language as either my first or my second language, this is because my formal education was conducted in English and French and not Chinese - I did French all the way till university and even spent time living, studying and working in France whereas I stopped Chinese lessons at the age of 17. I still speak Mandarin today but because I had been pushed to use French at university and at work, it has pushed me to get my French to near-native standard whilst I don't really have any use for my Chinese in my line of work, so it has gone somewhat rusty. I find it hard to relate to people with whom I have little or nothing in common with - I was the first in my family to live and work in France, in a French speaking environment. I have only one other distant relative in Hong Kong who did study in France (in fact he married a French-Vietnamese lady whilst he was there and hence their children can speak French as well), but apart from him and his wife, there's absolutely no one in my extended family who can relate to that part of my life. Instead, I find friends that I have plenty in common with to fill that gap - problem solved.

After all, I didn't get to choose my parents and I most certainly didn't get to choose whom my ancestors were. However, I did choose to study French and go to France, that was entirely my choice. The same can be said about my relationship with the Welsh language and how I feel a sense of connection to places like Wales and the Welsh-speaking parts of Patagonia in Argentina where I recently visited. hence I'm far more interested in the matters in my life that I do have control over, rather than stuff that are way beyond my control. The closest I ever got to feeling connected with my ancestry was when I was in Taipei last year - my partner was exhausted after a long day and the weather had been unbearably hot. But I never skip dinner no matter how tired I was so I headed out to the nearest night market (oh I adore those vibrant Taiwanese night markets) and I had a plate of  '蚝煎' - the Taiwanese version is quite different from the Singaporean version (I refer you to the Youtube video below) and I conversed with the old man at the hawker stall entirely in Hokkien. I think I enjoyed the conversation with the hawker far more than the 蚝煎! Being able to converse in Hokkien brought back memories of the family gatherings during my childhood, where my mother would sit in the kitchen and chat to her siblings in entirely Hokkien. Thus being able to still speak Hokkien today gave me a sense of connection to something from my childhood (Mandarin simply doesn't have the same effect on me) - but even then, this was something from my childhood. Genealogy takes it to another level where you're investigating the lives of ancestors who had died decades or even centuries before you were born and trying to form a connection them is actually quite different.

I am amazed at how my Irish family has made to effort to get to know me and how embraced me: they certainly made the whole funeral process a bit easier and their social interaction was a welcome distraction from the tedious task of sorting out my late mother in law's estate. I'm just imagining how in a hundred years, in 2119, long after I am dead, the children of my Irish cousins would be talking about me as the gay uncle from Singapore who was at the funeral. I have become a part of the story of their family and ironically, I was not expecting that to arise from the funeral. For me, the acid test has always been this simple question: would I be friends with you if we weren't related in any way? Or in the case of colleagues, would I even be talking to you if we weren't forced to work together? I have pretty high standards before I can emotionally connect with someone even as a friend, but somehow I got the feeling that I was pretty much accepted unconditionally into my Irish family as a matter of courtesy, as a matter of respect and that did surprise me a little. I thought I had to charm them, amuse them and get them to like me before that would happen. But these people were forming emotional connections with dead Irish ancestors they have never met, so surely it was easier for them to establish some kind of rapport with me when I was in the same room. Perhaps this is why I don't have much of an interest in genealogy: even if I did have a time machine and could somehow travel back in time to meet my ancestors, I doubt I would have anything in common with them, certainly not enough to have any kind of basis for an emotional bond.

My ancestors were very Chinese and did Chinese things - culturally, I'm distinctly different from them as I am a total banana: yellow on the outside but totally white on the inside. So really, I have nothing in common with them. So let's say even if someone like my sister decided to get interested in genealogy, she then does all the hard work, all the research to find out about our ancestors and then she says, "I've pieced together our family tree, I'm going to email it all over to you now." How would I react? I would probably read the information with great interest, hoping to find someone interesting in there - after all, I already have some pretty saucy stories from my family that I remember from my childhood, so just let me share one with you: I have an uncle who was a gambler, he ran up huge amounts of gambling debts and realized that there was no way he could pay back the loan sharks. So one night, he just disappeared, left a note for his family and disappeared into the night, effectively abandoning his wife and children. No one knew where he went for nearly 30 years then we get a letter from Brazil - he is very old and very ill, but he couldn't die without letting his family know what happened. He had remarried and started a new family, a whole new life in Brazil after settling there, far away from the loan sharks who were out to kill him - the letter contained contact details for his children in Brazil should we wanted to establish contact with them. Oh I would have loved to - imagine, having Portuguese speaking distant cousins in Brazil you could one day visit in South America, like just how amazingly cool is that? So yeah, if there were more cool stories like that, I would definitely be interested in my genealogy. I just fear that there would be an absence of interesting stories.

So there you go, that's it from me on the issue of genealogy. What do you think? Are you interested in your genealogy? Or are you merely interested in the relatives who are alive and not interested in those who are deceased? Why are some people so interested in genealogy - what do they get out of it? Have you ever tried to find out anything about your great grandparents and what did you find? Or are you not at all interested in it? Do leave a comment, many thanks for reading.