“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
-Michael Crichton, Timeline
The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” We get the idea. If you live in a constant present timeframe, only seeking a sequence of sensorial experiences to get through your life, you have been, are, and will be manipulated. To many alive today, nothing of significance happened before you were born.
This article is a call to arms leading to the 250th anniversary of our republic. However, it is a different sort of call to arms. I want to get you invested in the 1776 revolution beyond just the ideals of that era. There will be many well written articles citing the founding fathers and their principles, documents, unprecedented actions, and immense bravery and suffering. I welcome it all. Many educated and articulate writers will surely do the subject justice. I will take a moment to go in another direction, and that is to get you invested in the revolution at the familial level – the genealogical level.
In our hyper-mobile, nearly ahistorical society, family history seems irrelevant. This article is for those who do not know their family’s history beyond their grandparents. According to a 2010 Ancestry.com press release, they claim 60% of modern Americans are descended from the colonial era. While that number seems high, you must note I state, ‘are descended from’, not can trace lineage to. And that’s because so many people have not traced lineage to the colonial era but can and now should.
I contend that along with celebrating the 250th anniversary through fireworks, gatherings, prayer, and so on, you should honor the memory of those who put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line by knowing who they were. Specifically, if you are descended from one or many of them. Honor them by remembering them individually.
We often study history by thinking of the Franks, Romans, Greeks, or whoever, in the abstract. Seldom do we consider that it was our ancestors at any given battle that took place. It changes the way you study history when you view it through the lens of family – that these were your people living in such time, doing such things, and thinking in such a way. It personalizes the narrative and makes it more real. We should not allow ourselves to think about events 250 years ago as an abstract colonial army or militia winning the revolution. We should consider it as our ancestors who won. This will have a great impact on our psyche and as a counterweight to the prevailing modern attitude toward our history, which is to say that our ancestors are not worth knowing because of social ills/norms projected onto the past. And if you think that being blasé or uninterested in your history will not impact you, you do not know history.
This audience needs no reminder of the multitude of efforts to minimize our history. Every action to do so continues a cultural erasure that should be taken seriously. The loss of our traditional national mythology is no surprise. As we become more of an economic zone than a nation state, we will continue to lose our heroes, history, and values. We will lose what bound us together. The country perhaps became too large to hold together as distance, population size and diversity, and divergent political leanings separate further. Maybe only through regionalism can a binding mythology be gained for that particular region, but that is a separate discussion.
I contend our country would be in a much different shape today if all of us knew our family history. We’d have a much greater connection to our land, our founding principles, and a sense of who we are as a people – the latter of which is probably the most eroded in the last 50 years. I don’t think as many people would be ambivalent or supportive of the multitudes of ways our country is being treated like a dead carcass waiting for vultures to tear at its flesh. We’d have a different attitude toward the rampant ill-gotten gain of various welfare fraud, government foreign aid scams, foreign interests in our national politics, and ungratefulness than many of our cohabitants in our lands exhibit. We built this, it is not for takes. This is your inheritance, your birthright.
Our country is in this state because we think of our own history in the abstract and not in the tangible, not as our blood. So for the 250th, do the research. There are many free tools or relatively low-cost tools to search for your people. Fold3 is a site to search military records. Get your family line settled, then see who the veterans are, where they lived, what units they served in, if they were in any major engagements, if they were in the revolution, and so on. Take this abstract and make it personal.
I also contend we must form our minds about who our colonial people were. Reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed and Senator Jim Webb’s Born Fighting are good starts, although there are many other books available on colonial life and the psyche of early Americans. A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier by Joseph Plumb Martin, a firsthand account, will help turn the abstract into the personal regarding the day to day of the Revolutionary War.
You can then take it a step further, if so inclined, and join the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution or Society of the Cincinnati. Maybe your kids would like to be in the Children of the Revolution. What better way to honor your patriot family’s sacrifices through public civic action and reminding the public that it was your kin that contributed to victory, that someone alive today remembers who was in the revolution. That their memory means something to our great nation 250 years later – a nation that is unequalled, in too many ways to list, among other nations in the past and present.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
