BCG 50th Anniversary - David McDonald, D. Min., CG, presenter
So everyone, this is Dave. Thanks, Lisa. Let me lay a little groundwork. First of all, the notion of Jubilee is a biblical term, you know. So most of you know that I'm also a pastor. And one of the things, Mary Harris was there, does this? Bernie cover this? Mary's the dean of the school where I earned my doctorate, so she came up here from Indianapolis. The idea of Jubilee, the celebration, is biblical in the sense that you all know the term sabbatical. You know that on the Sabbath, the seventh day, the Lord rested. On the sabbatical, the seventh year in a cycle was the year historically in which the fields were allowed to lie fallow. And if they were allowed to lie fallow, that meant that the fields would produce better in the long term if there was a period of rest that was involved. So that when you multiply all of those sabbaticals every seven-year cycle, you come to the 49th year, which is what we are in. We're in the 50th year. We passed the 49th anniversary, if you will. So this is the year of Jubilee. And in Jubilee, the people celebrate. They party, they enjoy one another's company. They learn to value what they have for what it is and the treasure.
Now, as have virtually everyone else in this room, you have made some effort to research your own families, I trust. How many of you have endured or seen or experienced someone's golden wedding anniversary? How many of you have enjoyed one for your own self? Good for you. Congratulations. That's a wonderful achievement.
In my own family, there are very few—in fact, in the recent generations of family members that I will have known personally—they do not exist. They have never happened. So through the gift of modern technology, those wonderful online database resources that do name searches, I've been able to find newspaper columns that were published in the local weekly newspapers that relate to both my great-grandparents and my double great-grandparents. Actually, a mother-daughter pair—both celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries in 1905 and 1944, my mother's maternal grandmother and her mother.
Now, being a pastor, I spend time around families in moments of delighted joy and also in great sorrow. That's the nature of my work. And so I get the chance to see what people have to show of themselves in both the best and the worst times. And while I would like to think that a Jubilee is the best of times, that is not always the case in the sense that they draw families together. Families gather.
Now, I was just sharing at the table. I'm the youngest of five children, and when you're the youngest—any other babies of the families here? Our mothers love us best. I don't care what anybody tries to tell us. Those of us who are the youngest know that there are stories that pre-exist our very being, and those stories that pre-exist our very being are naturally and formatively reshaped when told to us by our older siblings, usually having to do with our own arrival in life, and they use them as selective torture devices, because that is the nature of the human beast. Because, of course, say it again, Mom loved you the best, and as long as Mom loved me the best, that means that Kathleen, Mary, Beth, Tom, and John really do have it in for me.
As I look at the story of the article on my double great-grandparents' wedding anniversary, 50 years in 1905, there's this lovely flowery prose of the circa turn of the last century, talking about how wonderful it all was, and all the wonderful gifts that they received, and how the meal was prepared. The ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church put out a lovely spread for the family picnic, and it read through those who were in attendance. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Strangely enough, of the nine children they had, only eight of them came. And I did a little thinking about that because the eighth party who was not there was actually the one who lived on the home farm where Grandma and Grandpa had given up the farm and moved into the village. Those of you who have those kinds of situations, when Grandpa is ready to give up the farming, they move into town. Home, and then the son or the presumably the son, perhaps the son-in-law, or maybe if they're old enough, a grandson, will take over the farming operations. All eight of the other children came from St. Louis and from Danville and came from Decatur and from surrounding towns, and the one local child did not come. I made an effort to look for another newspaper accounting to see if they had simply left the name off, because everybody would know who they were. But the two weeklies and the one regional daily all had an accounting of this wedding anniversary, and all three of them left off that set of names.
Now, that spoke volumes to me 100-odd years later, as I was looking at the material. It made me think of what families are and they do. And we who pursue our families for fun and occasionally for profit, we pursue our families so we can know about them, and we're left with the task of intuiting things that are not always written down. We who practice what I call the genealogical arts—because there is the social science of family history studies, but there is, I think, very firmly an aspect of our work that is an art. And the art of genealogy involves the intuition, the ability to see the unwritten that you can then correlate through evidence and other pieces, to be able to piece together what is not spoken of—a family feud. How do you address those things, and how in a Jubilee do you acknowledge those things? When families come together in times of joy or sorrow, usually, there is an ability to paper over the differences. If you've been only for a few hours or a couple of days, I can get through this, make sure my gin is close.
Or conversely, don’t you dare leave my side, honey. Do not leave me to these people.
Now, when you visit with extended families, those of us who have been blessed with children of our own over the course of the years know that introducing your children to the crazy relatives is not always a simple thing, and either at Grandma and Grandpa's 50th wedding anniversary or Grandpa's funeral, there is a moment when you do actually let Uncle Harold come out of the attic, and you have to let him be known. And that's not Uncle Harold Henderson, I'm just saying.
There does come that moment when the stories that you have heard suddenly take on an entirely new meaning just on the basis of seeing someone walk in the room, and you begin to understand why it is your mother does not answer certain questions, and when you ask them, she gets bristly.
Jubilee is to be in the business of being joyful even when moments are not joy-filled. And that's family. None of us has chosen our families. We may have chosen our spouses, perhaps, but we don't choose those brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles that have come into our lives. We do not—we may choose to bear children or not, but once they're here, we have less control over them than we might like to admit. And as we watch their lives unfold and we watch the lives of our nephews and nieces unfold, there are challenging, descriptive moments that come to bear. And how do you live those out in Jubilee? Because in Jubilee, we are to be joyful.
Now, what does that have to do with BCG? What does that have to do with genealogy? As I said before, I believe that the work we pursue as genealogists, whether we have credentials or not, begins in a joyful experience. Think hard on the first time you encountered a real record, the first time you found your grandmother's family Bible, your aunt's notes, a photograph in an age-old suitcase that you had never seen before that looks frighteningly like your older brother when he's mad. You find those things, and people begin to leap off of those images and those pages, and they begin to become very real for us. How many of you have had conversations in these last couple of days or over the course of the next few where you will be talking about people who have been dead for 90 years, but you're talking about them as if they were living last week back home? We take these people and we take ownership of them, which is to our blessing. It is to our good that we have the chance to look at these people and see them and see them for their warts.
I look at that family of nine children—the one nearest son and wife and children who did not come to their parents', grandparents', great-grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1905. I begin to look at the eight who were there. Shall I describe them for you? There was the brother who was the Klansman. There was the brother who slept with his other brother's wife. There was the father-in-law who slept with the granddaughter. The pieces of the family get more and more complex, and the stories that they tell that we are actively pursuing and actively seeking to understand inform relationships over time. Those uncles, those aunts, those cousins, those impacts of those stories reverberate over the course of a century. Subsequently, and as you look, as I look, and I see what was said and what was done and what was not said or done, it makes perfect sense that Uncle Ed wasn’t there, and perhaps it was not Uncle Ed’s fault. It was perhaps even to the good that he had the wisdom to stay away, not for his own sake but for the sake of others, that they might be able to celebrate that
family that was before them.
So, I hope you find joy in the people you pursue and the stories you come across. I hope you find joy in the questions you ask. I hope you find joy in the answers you get and the answers you don't get. There is joy in what you do. There is joy in what you learn. There is joy in the persistence of the quest and the persistence of the challenge.
And as you bring that together and you gather together to celebrate, I hope that in the fullness of Jubilee, the fullness of your research, the fullness of your work, the fullness of your life, that you may find the joy that Jubilee speaks of and that you might find the joy that is contained in the family.
Thank you.