To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root. – Chinese Proverb. 

As we get closer to the fourth of July, I have found that I have been sentimental thinking about my heritage and culture and very much interested in knowing my own family’s history.

I have made friends in my day with people from all around the world. People from India, China, Egypt, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom. Some I have lost touch with over the years, some I still talk to very regularly. 

One of my closest friends is an individual in the United Kingdom whom I have spent hours upon hours over the last several years conversing with on many topics of great interest to me. The one conversation that stands out very clearly to me now is the day I told them my heritage is very Scottish. I will never forget the response of “That is such an American thing to say.” And it’s true! It really is such an United States of America sentiment but one that reflects our history as a nation. 

My friend in the UK is Irish. Their ancestry has been strongly Irish for hundreds of generations. They may have gone around the UK a little bit, England and Scotland, but their parents are Irish, their grandparents are Irish, their great grandparents are Irish back and back and back through history. And that is the case with almost all of my friends from other countries. Their country of origin is the country of their ancestors back and back and back from generations upon generations with minimal change. 

But in the USA, we are a nation of immigrants. A nation built on the backs of people who came looking for a better future or who were forced across the ocean by slave trade, famine, a desire for something better, or as an escape from religious prosecution. In the USA, unless we were Native Americans, our origin story started elsewhere. And even within Native cultures, many were forced from tribal lands to live in reservations away from the roots of their ancestors. 

My mother has been scrapbooking since before I was born. She has always told me that when I got old enough she would pass the family photo albums and the family photos and videos to me to keep and that time has finally come. I have the photos and the albums and the records of our past generations. In fact, the whole first photo album is our family history back to my great great grandparents. Stories I had never heard before about people I had never met on both my mother and my fathers side, though mainly my mothers since she was the one keeping the albums. I have a brief genealogy writing from my paternal grandfather and a lengthy genealogy from my paternal grandmother. It has been a joy of mine over this last week to take the information I have gathered and use Ancestory.com to trace my family lineage back as far as I can.

My family is truly very Scottish and English with Welsh and Cherokee thrown in. Some of my family, it seems, arrived pre-revolutionary war in the Virginia Colonies. Lots of my family on my mothers side can be traced through Tennessee and many of my fathers through Illinois. How my family got to Oklahoma and then now to Alaska is interesting to me. But one thing we never lost is the knowledge that, for the most part, we are a family whose roots started elsewhere. 

We are a nation of immigrants and almost all of our roots started elsewhere. 

As we come to the Fourth of July, a holiday near to the USA as the day we signed the Declaration of Independence and a day we use to celebrate our freedoms, let’s take a moment to remember where each of us came from. Some can be found in the records of Ellis Island. Some can be found in the records of sea crossings from Europe. Some can be found in slave records for plantation work or the railroads. But most of us started somewhere else.  

We are connected to the outside world through our ancestry. We are connected to each other in the USA through our shared history of immigrants making the most of it. Lets not forget that. 

Lets not forget our roots. 

-Dare.