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Zusatztext "Jackson’s account is an easily digested travelogue into her family’s history and a vivid journey into the world of genealogy." — The Boston Globe Informationen zum Autor Buzzy Jackson earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from UC Berkeley, where she wrote her first book, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (W.W. Norton: 2005). She has received numerous writing and teaching awards, including those from UC Berkeley, PEN-West and the American Library Association. She is currently a Research Affiliate at The Center of the American West at CU-Boulder. Buzzy writes for many online publications as well as for radio and film. To contact Buzzy and find out more about her current projects, visit www.buzzyjackson.com. Klappentext Jackson presents a glimpse inside the quirky and obsessive world of genealogy enthusiasts! while investigating her own tangled family tree. Leseprobe 1 Ask Yourself Why You’re Doing This; or, Genealogy for Beginners Ask yourself why you’re doing this.” Pat Roberts, a woman with a stylish haircut, some serious jewelry, and the no-nonsense voice of a high school guidance counselor, stared out at the group of strangers who’d shown up for the introduction-to-genealogy seminar that morning at the Boulder Public Library. I suddenly realized what was coming: just like that guidance counselor, this enigmatic gatekeeper was about to tell us whether our expectations were realistic or just plain ridiculous. “Ask yourself why you’re doing this,” she repeated, this time with a rhetorical spin. “If I put that question to each of you, I’d get twenty different answers. So ask yourself: What do you hope to find?” Other people’s history In my case, it was a circus tent and a dentist. And a cattle farm in Mississippi and, of course, Windswept. I’d come to the Boulder Public Library looking for the truth, if it existed, behind both the tall tales told by my family as well as the silences. I didn’t suspect scandal, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find some. This seemed realistic; at least, it didn’t seem totally absurd. I was also looking for one other thing: a strategy. I was looking for Jacksons—my Jacksons, among an ocean of people who shared my name but not my DNA. Jackson is the twentieth most popular surname in the United States; in the year 2000, 666,125 Americans were named Jackson. We are legion—but whom did I mean by “we”?1 My father, Jon Anthony Jackson, is one of eight children spread out over seven states. They like each other, yet they rarely see each other. As a family, we neither send nor receive regular Christmas letters. Frankly, most of us probably feel virtuous if we can remember all the cousins’ names. Now that my grandfather Jabe and grandmother Grace Jackson are dead, there is no central “home” to return to—not that many of their children visited much, anyway. Whether that is normal, I don’t know, but it sure didn’t make for a strong sense of heritage. I’d spent seven years getting a Ph.D. in history … other people’s history. It had never occurred to me to look into my own. Recently, this lack of family narrative began to bother me. The furthest back I could trace my ancestors was three generations: my great-grandparents. That barely got me into the nineteenth century, and I started to feel a little, well, irresponsible about it. I’d spent a lot of time in graduate school tracing the history of African-Americans, people who lamented their history of enslavement not only for its obvious privations, but also because of the way slavery erased their family connections, as parents, children, siblings were separated and sold, names changed, and records lost. Something similar had happened on my mother’s side of the family, Russian Jews who fled persecution to come to the United States in the brief wi...
