Not long ago, I finally got bitten by the genealogy bug. All of the relatives who could have helped me with this were gone by the time I started with this. But there are also lots of resources available today on the Internet, and that got me hooked. So over the past 5 months or so, I’ve been doing a lot of web surfing, looking for various clues about the lives of my ancestors and the world that they lived in. In some cases, the search engines have led me to buy a book or contact a government agency, but they have also led to some web sites where I’ve found direct reference to family members (e.g., the Ellis Island web site search, and the 1920 and 1930 Census info available for a fee on ancestry.com). Overall, it’s been much like any other form of academic research, all dry and crisp and precise. As a geek-like eternal student, that kind of thing appeals to me. So it’s been enjoyable.

But it has also made me stop and think: what about the human factor here? Back when I was a kid, I was pretty close to a lot of the stuff that I’m now looking down at from “on high”. I was actually around the kind of people that I’m now reading about, i.e. the immigrants and their immediate offspring. I actually saw and heard and otherwise sensed a bit of the “older world” that I now seek to rediscover from a digital perspective. E.g., meat markets and other ratty little stores, tenement buildings and people raising pigeons for food, women cooking cabbage soup. And to be honest, I didn’t always like that world. I wanted to be a regular suburban American kid, and the old “pollock” stuff seemed very un-cool. Those people were locked into the past, inferior to me and my friends.

So I feel a bit schizoid about the whole project. In some ways I am sorry for once being so uncharitable and dismissive about “the old world” that had still been a part of my mother and fathers’ lives. But in another way, I still harbor some negative feelings about that world. I generally don’t look back at it nostalgically, longing to recapture something of the way that they lived.

But actually, I have differences in feeling about my mother’s “old world” versus my father’s “old world”. I was (and still am) more sympathetic to my mother’s relatives and the experiences that I had as a child with them (in the Dundee neighborhood of Passaic). I remember that the people involved on my mother’s side seemed “nicer”. I still looked down at them for the most part (except for my Uncle Bruno, who was always pretty cool). But today, it seems much easier for me to have good feelings about “Mom’s old world”.

My dad came from Wallington, which was a early on the suburb of Dundee, the place where factory workers went to buy a home with a little bit of a backyard once they could save some money. I’d need a shrink and a lot of time and money to ferret out all of my memories regarding my father and then analyze them; but the bottom line is that I didn’t like his world too much. They didn’t seem as nice as the Dundee crowd. They seemed more “Americanized”, but in the worst ways. E.g., mindlessly materialistic, concerned about status without a sense of style, locked in a continuing sense of dissatisfaction. Dundee somehow seemed to retain some “old world charm” to balance off the old-world poverty. By contrast, Wallington seemed to have ditched the poverty, to a greater extent, but also lost the charm, to be replaced by a bastardized Polish-American sense of reality.

I’m probably being unfair to my father and his Wallington world in many ways. And my present exercise in genealogy will hopefully be a good way for me to come to grips with my own prejudices. But there is one thing that I remember that I still believe needed rejection. And that was the attitude about other ethnic groups and races that I picked up around my father’s friends and associates.

Not that my mother’s “Dundee world” was utterly innocent in that regard. They were quite afraid of the black and Puerto Rican families who started moving in during the late 50’s. I also recall my mother telling me and my brother that we shouldn’t get too involved with Italian families — read, don’t bring an Italian girl home to be your bride. But on the other side of the coin, they maintained some humility about other kinds of people; the “n-word” for blacks and the “s-word” for Puerto Ricans was not used (sensibly enough, given that the “p-word” could easily be used against them). And actually, my Uncle Bruno (who was still living in Dundee with my grandparents) told us that as future world travelers, we should be ready to meet different people. He even told us of some good experiences he had with blacks in his travels.

OK, so my Uncle wasn’t exactly a freedom marcher in Mississippi, and the rest of my mother’s relatives had their fears. But compared with what I heard from the Wallington crowd, this was positively enlightened. Let’s just say that my father’s people weren’t terribly circumspect about using insults against other races. I still remember those guys in their T-shirts with cigarettes and beer guts, talking about how “they” just don’t want to work and “they” expect others to take care of them and “they” behave like pigs. There was a certain viciousness in their words, which I just don’t remember from the Dundee crowd. Well, maybe that’s just a phase that people coming out of poverty need to go through. The Dundee folk were content to keep renting their little cold-water tenement apartments; the Wallington folk were now land-owners, and thus had more to lose (and not much more income to keep it with). Their pride mixed with their heightened fears of losing what they had achieved, and spawned some very uncharitable attitudes about all that remained “outside the boundaries”.

That’s the human factor that the research doesn’t immediately reveal. In a lot of ways, I probably was wrong in overlooking what was good about the good old days. I purposely stayed away from the people who could have told me directly what I’m now trying to discover via the Internet. I had my uppity attitudes, and that was wrong. HOWEVER, there were indeed things about the good old days that were not so good. I hope that I’ve at least done a little bit better in terms of being open to all people, to overcoming the tribalism that ultimately dooms humanity to war without end. I’m not free of bigotry and bad attitudes, but at least it concerns me. I think the same goes for my brother and all of my cousins. Hopefully, there was some generational progress in that regard after all.