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\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s been enjoyable.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m now looking down at from \u201con high\u201d. I was actually around the kind of people that I\u2019m now reading about, i.e. the immigrants and their immediate offspring. I actually saw and heard and otherwise sensed a bit of the \u201colder world\u201d 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\u2019t always like that world. I wanted to be a regular suburban American kid, and the old \u201cpollock\u201d stuff seemed very un-cool. Those people were locked into the past, inferior to me and my friends. <\/p>\n
So I feel a bit schizoid about the whole project. In some ways I am sorry for once being so uncharitable and dismissive about \u201cthe old world\u201d that had still been a part of my mother and fathers\u2019 lives. But in another way, I still harbor some negative feelings about that world. I generally don\u2019t look back at it nostalgically, longing to recapture something of the way that they lived. <\/p>\n
But actually, I have differences in feeling about my mother\u2019s \u201cold world\u201d versus my father\u2019s \u201cold world\u201d. I was (and still am) more sympathetic to my mother\u2019s 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\u2019s side seemed \u201cnicer\u201d. 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 \u201cMom\u2019s old world\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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\u2019t like his world too much. They didn\u2019t seem as nice as the Dundee crowd. They seemed more \u201cAmericanized\u201d, 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 \u201cold world charm\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m 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\u2019s friends and associates.<\/p>\n
Not that my mother\u2019s \u201cDundee world\u201d 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\u2019s. I also recall my mother telling me and my brother that we shouldn\u2019t get too involved with Italian families — read, don\u2019t 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 \u201cn-word\u201d for blacks and the \u201cs-word\u201d for Puerto Ricans was not used (sensibly enough, given that the \u201cp-word\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
OK, so my Uncle wasn\u2019t exactly a freedom marcher in Mississippi, and the rest of my mother\u2019s relatives had their fears. But compared with what I heard from the Wallington crowd, this was positively enlightened. Let\u2019s just say that my father\u2019s people weren\u2019t 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 \u201cthey\u201d just don\u2019t want to work and \u201cthey\u201d expect others to take care of them and \u201cthey\u201d behave like pigs. There was a certain viciousness in their words, which I just don\u2019t remember from the Dundee crowd. Well, maybe that\u2019s 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 \u201coutside the boundaries\u201d. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the human factor that the research doesn\u2019t 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\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5533,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions\/5533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}