Ancestral Families

All one has to do is look at the various state and federal censuses to get a picture of our ancestral families.

Not only do we learn their location in a specific county and township, but how close they were to their family. It's very common to see several generations within one household. Another common tendency is to see several households within one section of land.

In my own family, in 1912, Mariah Birdsell lived in the home she had with her husband William. Also in that home was their son, Oscar and his wife, Mary. The four children of Oscar and Mary also lived there. Did they have family problems? I'm sure they did. Mary was very ill and died in April. That's one type of problem.

Was there unresolved issues between Oscar and his mother? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Our ancestors were not perfect. I'm sure many of them did things that would make us hang our heads in shame. I'm sure they offended each other to various degrees. I'm sure there was friction.

But when multiple families are living in the same household or when three families are living in three different buildings on the same 160 acres, the chances are extremely high that any major difference has been resolved.

Lately, I've been thinking about Marion and Albert. Did they leave so they could own land? Or did they leave because things couldn't be resolved and that was the best way to resolve them? Or was it a combination of both?

We'll probably never know for sure.

The sisters are easier to figure out. They stayed because their husband stayed. They left because their husband left.

Did Oscar and Art stay because they wanted to? Or did they stay because there were no other sons to take over what their mother and father had built for them? Sometimes that is why the one who stays, stays. There's no one left but them to continue on and they feel it's their obligation to keep it all intact.

But back to our ancestral families. We don't know why they did the things they did. We don't know if they really did resolve their problems or not. It just seems more likely that they were able to do so when they all lived so closely together. Not only did they live in a small space, but they depended on each other to do their fair share. Their survival depended on it.

Also because they lived in such close quarters, one would imagine that if someone did something that the majority found unacceptable they would be forced to remedy those tendencies. One would think that. But looking at it now, a hundred years later, we really don't know. We can only guess using what we ourselves know about how things are today.

Our ancestral families weren't perfect. But they're ours.

Our living family aren't perfect. But they're ours.

As long as there are families some will love, some will hate, some will hurt, some will disappear. Perhaps all in the same family. Probably very much like what happened in our ancestral families.