Unearthing the Past

Digging through old family stories may shed new light on our own

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

For a history nerd and storyteller, sometimes the most personal stories, our families’ stories, are the least understood. Myths grow up around events and people that defy questioning. Challenging those myths to get to the truth of what really happened, or who those people really are can be seen as heresy.

That’s why it’s taken me decades as a writer to tackle that literary form known as memoir. Not to tackle my own story, but that of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who I never really got a chance to know.

Her long life—from her birth in a small village in the Jewish Pale of Settlement where she was born in what is now Ukraine in 1874, to Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, where she died in 1964—has long been shrouded in mystery.

The onset of the war in Ukraine brought a kind of urgency to finding out who Sophie really was. I was eight-years-old when she died, and never heard her voice. By the time I came around, Grandma had suffered a series of strokes. She was bedridden. She couldn’t speak.

But memoirs require facts, impressions, stories. And since my mother and all her siblings are long gone, there’s no one to ask for those telling moments, those personal insights, those anecdotes that would add flesh to the bones of Sophia Saslovsky Silverstein.

Primary resources being scarce on the ground, I’ve had to turn to other means to get to know Grandma.

To that end, I recently did a DNA saliva test. You know, where you spit into a tube, send it out to a commercial lab and see where you came from?

Since I am female, I knew it would only reveal the mitochondrial DNA—the genetic inheritance from my mother’s side. I assumed, based on genealogical research into the family tree, at the very least, I’d find a heavy dose of Eastern European and Russian Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, which proved to be the overwhelming geographical favorite from her side.

Still the analysis delivered one big surprise: some very long-ago ancestor was Neanderthal.

Maybe your DNA analysis has also shown surprises. Thanks to technology, biology and big data, there has been an explosion in the popularity of tracing family history—people we never knew existed turn out to be family members. Online family trees now connect us not only to generations in the distant past, but to each other in the present. Massive electronic databases aggregate everything from census data to birth, marriage and death records, digitized for ease of searching—and sometimes, as a result, we’re finding skeletons popping out of the closet.

But Neanderthal! I guess I have to be grateful that some human came along 40,000 years ago in an act of love (humor me: I want to imagine it was love) that rescued my 1,500-times great grandmother’s descendants, including me, from extinction.

Naturally, as a science writer, I love pondering the evidence. The more data points that can be substantiated, the better.

But data doesn’t touch the traumas our ancestors endured and that we may continue to carry in our own lives. Much of the hard data that could tell me about the lives of my Ukrainian Jewish ancestors was destroyed. Discrimination, antisemitism, pogroms, firing squads, the Holocaust. . .name the terror and our people have likely suffered through it.

Recovering Lost Time

As a time traveler and a storyteller (by the way, I’d love to find a test to find family affinities for this history + science + fiction obsession of mine), I look for ways to imagine into the past. To collect stories of hope and inspiration, and to disrupt the collective traumas passed down and compounded by family and environmental dysfunction.

I have been interested in writing about how my maternal grandmother, who grew up in a tiny shtetl in what is now Ukraine, left home alone in 1893, and traveled halfway across the world to America on the promise she would reunite with and marry Abe, a landsman (in Yiddish, this term refers to a person from the same town or region), who had asked for her hand before he left their village five years earlier, when my grandmother was only 13 years old.

Together, they hoped to build a new life, a new home and family, in the United States of America. The Golden Land.

That is the mythological basis for their American dream. All I heard from my mother, Sophie’s daughter, about her mother’s long and perilous journey, was that her parents wed the day after Sophie landed in Covington, Kentucky, raised the all-American family, and lived happily ever after.

And my mother, being a Pollyanna, was pleased to embroider on that success story. But facts supporting my mom’s fairy-tale family origins story are sparse.

But I was interested in going deeper. Thanks to a thread of a story about my grandmother’s crossing to America, I suspected she carried a secret. One that she could reveal to no one in her lifetime.

To me, her silence spoke volumes. If only I could access the details!

New Ways to Reveal Old Stories

I decided to follow the thread. I wanted to get to know my grandmother as a whole person, not as a branch on the family tree. To learn about her life, her loves and losses.

To find out who she really was and what I have gotten from her besides mitochondrial DNA.

In addition to the impediments of time and space—after all, she was born almost 100 years before me—there is the fact of wars, destruction, death.

And if those aren’t obstacles enough, historically speaking, women’s stories have long been hidden from public view, their contributions devalued. With some notable exceptions women like my grandmother—who came to America in the late 1800s with no command of the English, either spoken or written—were not written into history.

They left no fingerprints.

There remains one more reason I want to learn her story: my grandmother was left, literally, without a voice at the end of her life. My mother, too, was left without a voice at the end of her life. I have been challenged with random, uncontrollable coughing spasms since I was 18-years-old.

Is this pattern based on some traumatic experience in the past? Does it only afflict the women in the family?

I am hoping that, by fleshing out Grandma’s story, unraveling the mystery of her life, and following the thread to learn how it is interwoven with mine, I might know her better. A thread has only two dimensions. It’s not very meaningful. But if I that one story thread might lead me to another, and another, allowing me to knot them together to see a bigger picture, what new meaning might emerge?

I believe that my grandmother finally would want her story told, to record “herstory” not for herself, but for her descendants. And for women throughout time who, like her, were left voiceless.

The challenge for me in penning this “ancestor memoir” with so few records in evidence, is how to proceed?

Strangely, from beyond the grave, it was Grandma, herself, who shared with me the snippet of her story, in a way I’ll share in a separate post.

And since that revelation came from “behind the veil” just one year ago, I decided to follow a path back in time that incorporates both the usual sources, and those less customary.

As my mother might say, dismissively, “Robin, what an imagination you have!”

But I have come to understand that these alternative ways of knowing are not simply products of my imagination. They provide supporting evidence to a story that cannot be reconstructed otherwise.

To pursue the story, I am taking what I call a “neuro-spiritual” approach. Here are some of the common and uncommon means I want to pursue as a story detective:

-   Family stories and oral histories

-      Genealogy/DNA/epigenetics

-      Neuroscience of memory

-      Somatic practices

-      Quantum science

-      Creative expression (art, theatre, dance, music, literature, film)

-      Journaling/automatic writing

-      Channeling

-      Astrology

-      Ritual/prayer/ meditation

-      AI/Metaverse

Uplifting HerStory

Going on a hunt like this to tell someone else’s story, someone who has been gone more than 60 years is daunting enough in its own right.

I have to ask myself the question: what right do I have to tell Grandma’s story? After all, she wouldn’t talk about her own life. And I can’t ask for her blessing.

Or can I?

But then, even if Grandma might grant me permission, how to overwrite the myth, to reweave her truth into the family tapestry in a way that honors her memory and begins to repair any trauma that has carried over to successive generations?

How to uplift her voice on behalf of the women of her generation, and to the benefit of generations yet to come?

In other words, is there a way, through this process, to change the future by revealing, by unveiling the secrets of the past?

I don’t know yet. I hope answers will be forthcoming, over time—and space. In the meantime, I invite you to join in the conversation in comments below.

Some questions to get the discussion started:

1.     Have you engaged in family history and, if so, how did you tackle your research?

2.     Were you able to find records that gave you a better understanding of a distant relative or ancestor?

3.     Have you engaged in any unconventional ways of knowing?

4.     What, if any, surprising facts came to light in the process?

Up next: The 130-year-old secret my grandmother revealed to me in 2023.