ROOTS
What We're Really Looking For When We Look Back
For thirty years, on and off, I've been chasing my own family tree. A name here. A record there. Long stretches where I'd forget about it entirely, and then a night, sometimes a whole weekend, where I'd fall back in and lose hours without noticing.
I used to think I was looking for facts. Dates. Places. The shape of a family tree with all its branches finally filled in. And for a long time, that's exactly what it was — a puzzle to solve, a gap to close, a name I didn't have yet that I was determined to find.
But somewhere in those thirty years, the search changed on me. I stopped looking for names and started looking for people.
That's a different kind of question entirely. Not who were they in the sense of dates and locations, but who were they in the sense that matters, what did they believe in? What did they refuse to compromise on? What did they build, protect, survive, or walk away from? What was it like to be them, on an ordinary Tuesday, three hundred years ago, worried about the same kinds of things we still worry about…money, family, illness, love, the people counting on us?
This month, here at The Fabric of Me, our theme is Roots. And I want to be honest about what I mean by that, because it's not what people usually assume when they hear the word.
It Was Never About Finding Someone Famous
During my research, I traced three separate branches of my grandparents' families back as far as the records would allow, into the twelve and thirteen hundreds, into countries I'd never set foot in, following names on documents that had somehow survived six centuries so that I could find them at 2am in my pajamas.
On one branch, the line kept going further than I expected, fourteen generations, fifteen, sixteen, and it turned out I'm descended from Mary, Queen of Scots.
I'll admit that discovery stopped me in my tracks. But not for the reason you'd think. It wasn't the crown that got me. Royal bloodlines are more common in family trees than people realize. Go back sixteen generations and there are tens of thousands of people who could make the same claim. The title, on its own, doesn't mean much.
What got me was the woman underneath it.
Mary was fiercely intelligent and fluent in four languages. She was magnetic, even people who despised her admitted they couldn't fully resist her presence. And she was, by every historical account, impulsive. She let her heart get ahead of her judgment more than once. She trusted her own confidence in herself a little too completely. She felt everything out loud, in a world that expected her not to. It cost her…a marriage, a throne, eventually her life. It also made her recognizably, uncomfortably human, four and a half centuries later.
I didn't find a queen back there. I found a woman with a temperament I understood, because I recognized parts of it in myself. The same impulsiveness, the same heart that sometimes outruns the plan, the same stubborn refusal to disappear quietly even when quiet would be easier.
That's the real find. Not the title. The recognition.
The Question Worth Asking
If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: the point of learning about your ancestors was never to find someone impressive. It's to find someone real. And in doing so, to find something real in yourself.
So the questions worth asking aren't "how far back can I trace this?" or "is anyone in my tree famous?" They're slower, harder, and much more interesting:
Who were they, really — not just names and dates, but people? What did a normal day look like for them? What did they worry about at night? What did they love enough to build a life around?
What did they stand for? Not in the abstract, in the specific, costly moments. What did they refuse to do, even when it would have made life easier? What did they insist on, even when no one was asking them to?
What were their values, and did those values survive the journey down to you? Sometimes a value skips a generation and reappears, unannounced, in someone who never even met the person who first held it.
How did they actually live? Not the highlight reel, the daily texture. What did they do for work, for joy, for survival? What did resilience look like for them, specifically, in their circumstances?
And — this is the one that changes everything — what of them do you recognize in yourself? Not just the traits you're proud of. The complicated ones, too. The impulsiveness. The stubbornness. The way you love too hard, or hold on too long, or refuse to back down. Chances are, you didn't invent that. You inherited it, quietly, from someone who needed it to survive whatever they were living through.
What It Feels Like to Find Yourself in Someone Else's Story
There's a particular feeling that comes with this kind of discovery, and I don't think there's a clean word for it. It's not pride, exactly, and it's not comfort either. It's something closer to recognition, the sense of being met by someone who's been gone for centuries, who somehow still knew exactly what it felt like to be you.
When I read about who Mary actually was, not the legend, the person, I didn't feel like I'd found a famous ancestor. I felt like I'd found a mirror with a six-hundred-year-old frame around it. The impulsiveness that gets ahead of my plans. The heart that overrules my head more often than I'd like to admit. A stubborn belief in myself that holds on even when nothing around me is holding it for me. A refusal to go quiet, even when quiet would be easier.
I clearly don't share her circumstances. Not even close. But I think I share her wiring.
And here's what I've come to believe: you don't need a famous name in your bloodline for this to happen to you. You need a name, any name , and the willingness to actually look at who that person was, instead of just what they accomplished or where they lived. Somewhere in the specifics of an ancestor's life, you'll find a piece of your own. A trait. A pattern. A way of holding onto yourself under pressure. It's there. It's just waiting for you to go looking.
An Invitation for August
This month, I'd love for you to try this yourself, in whatever small way fits your life.
Ask the oldest living person in your family one specific question — not "tell me about your life," but something pointed: What was the hardest thing you ever lived through? What were you like before that happened, and after?
Ask relatives for copies of anything they're holding onto, birth certificates, immigration papers, old letters, military records. People sit on these for decades without realizing anyone else would want them. Ask for photos, too, especially the ones with names and dates written on the back. A face changes everything a record can't tell you.
Search one name on a historical records site. One name is enough to start a thread.
And then, this is the part people skip, actually sit with what you find. Don't just collect it. Ask what it means. Ask what you recognize.
None of this has to happen all at once. It took me thirty years, on and off, to get where I am, and I'm still not done. The point was never really to finish. It was to keep pulling the thread, a little at a time, and see who was waiting on the other end.
Roots don't just tell you where you came from. Sometimes they're the only way to understand who you actually are.
I'll be sharing more of what I've found in my own family's history throughout August — on Instagram, in the smaller, rougher pieces that don't fit in a blog post. Follow along [@wovenwordpress] if you want to see where the thread leads.