On My Bookshelf

Sometimes I worry about what our young people are learning.  Or, more to the point, what they are not learning. I don’t like to think about all those man-in-the-street interviews I’ve seen on various TV programs where John Doe can’t answer questions like “Who was the first President of the United States.”  Or millennials who are not sure whether John Kennedy was a rock star or a scientist.  Really!  When did they stop teaching history?

But, come to think of it, I didn’t learn much history in school.  I wasn’t good at all those names and dates and battles and treaties.  BORING.  But I did love the stories of long ago that were told around the fire on stormy evenings here in Oysterville.   The stories of Mary Esty, one of our forebears, who was hung during the witch trials in Salem.  Or the story of my great-grandfather being apprenticed to a tailor back in Pennsylvania when he was fifteen and who eventually made his way west by driving the ox team for a man named Whitlock.

In Ireland

Gradually, an idea of my own family’s history began to clarify.  Even more gradually I began to put those people I “knew” into a greater context and of American history, in general, and the part that my very own forebears played in it made more sense.  Never mind those history texts.  But it wasn’t until I did some travelling – back east to visit my father’s relatives and later to Ireland to see where his family lived and where I still have relatives – not until then did I really begin to appreciate the past.  The distances, the circumstances, the courage, the hardships all began to make sense.  Historical sense.

So, earlier this week when I asked my FaceBook friends a couple of informal survey questions about their ancestry, I was pleased to get so many answers (several hundred in the first twenty-four hours).  I don’t know that all the folks who responded could answer those man-in-the-street history questions, but curiosity about one’s own ancestry seems like a first step.  And if it’s true that only by understanding our history can we avoid repeating past mistakes, perhaps there is a chance for us after all!