Hannah Cowan: Family Roots: Diving Deeper than DNA
It’s a special thing to walk away from your breakaway with your experiences; it’s a rare thing to walk away with a family.
My story starts a few years prior to my flight from Charlotte to Edinburgh. Since I was old enough to understand the importance of history and ancestry, I quickly learned that where we come from plays a large role in who we are. My last two years of high-school I dedicated my final project to my family tree. Little did I know that this was just the first step into discovering who I was and what I would learn. My grandmother, Debbie Collings, more fondly known as Grandma Willie (my father’s mother-we can discuss my nicknames for all my grandparents another time) had begun looking into DNA tests, Ancestry.com, among other things as a way to trace her genealogy and find out more about her family roots.
Soon, we began finding out incredible pieces of our family tree, some things that expanded on what we already knew and somethings that were new to us entirely.
Now, fast forward to the Spring of 2018. I had met some incredible people during my time at St Andrews and learned what can come from putting yourself in the position to learn more about the world than ever thought possible. Then, my grandmother asked me to join them on a trip to Germany, specifically Munich in the Bavarian area, where part of the trip would be centered around meeting members of my family that my grandmother had discovered. One of these persons is Simon. To my grandmother, he stems from her mother’s father’s (Grandaddy Wurfl is his name) lineage. Simon’s grandfather was brother to her grandfather. Her and Simon had begun emailing through Ancestry.com, due to results of my DNA being posted to others who carry similar genes.
According to my grandmother, “when Simon’s first uncle, Uncle Edward died without any immediate heirs. The attorney handling Edward’s estate hired Simon to find relatives who could qualify to inherit Edward’s property. He found every person on that list, all 82 of them including my mother. Doing that gave Simon more insight into all the living heirs’ life stories. He shared many of those stories with me. What a treasure”. It was incredibly exciting knowing that I was going to be part of something so special. It was a perfect way to round out my time abroad, a wholesome and eye-opening trip that added to becoming a better informed, experienced global citizen.
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| Freising Cathedral |
I met Simon after getting settled in our hotel. Simon and his family live in Paunzhausen, Germany, a small, rural town where my great-great grandfather was born. I got to see the house he was born in, and even the church he went to with his family. That church originally built before the year 700, was the most beautiful building I saw in my six months abroad and something I would not have known about had I not visited. Being in this town, I saw where my ancestors had worked, lived, and loved.
Simon was tall, smart looking, and incredible kind. I wondered if language would be an issue. I hadn’t even asked. I was immediately enveloped in a hug and asked, in extremely proficient English how I was. Soon after that, I met his wife, two of his daughters, and even his granddaughter. I met Simon’s mother and father, who while barely speaking any English tried incredibly hard to ask me questions and wanted to show me every photo and every piece of their well-loved, truly-lived in home. We sat around their massive farm-like table and I was shown photos of my family going back generations. I saw military photos, marriage portraits, birthday parties, and I’m not really sure how to convey in words the emotions I felt.
The connection of sitting next to my family around that table with old newspaper clippings in one hand and photos that conveyed a loving family in another was something that I will never be able to replicate.With my grandmother, I was able to experience wonderful relatives, that anyone would be lucky to have. Watching my grandmother’s connection with them, both of us craving to know more about history and culture, we now had something you couldn’t get walking through a museum. We had people who were there, who had walked through history or heard first-hand accounts of things that had happened. My grandmother, and then a few years later, me, was able to see how our relatives fit into the pages of history and Bavaria.
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| From left to right: Ilka (Simon's wife), Irmgard (Simon's mother), Me, Grandma Willie (my father's mother), and Simon |
Over the next week or so we explored Munich and surrounding areas. My grandmother and I have always been fascinated by World War II and Nazi Germany, and now we had a direct link to the things we saw during our trip.
My grandmother has recounted numerous stories from her family members to me thanks to her emailing with Simon and her previous trip that was centered around meeting relatives and learning about history. Being able to hear some of these stories took my breath away, listening to her and Simon recount these stories as we were driving or walking. One story, told by my grandmother was about a husband of one of the cousins during WWII who lived on a small farm with his wife and two children. She puts it most eloquently.
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| Gate entering Dachau. It reads "work sets you free" |
“He had been drafted by the army but he refused to serve Hitler. He hid in the barn. The children didn’t know he was there until the older daughter saw her mother regularly going into the barn with food. When she figured out her dad was in there, the mother had to warn her to not tell the soldiers because all of the family would have been killed. Imagine being told that when you’re 11 years old. Even though the soldiers tried to bribe her with chocolate, she never told. When it was safe, the father escaped to Switzerland until after the war. Simon’s mother, Irmgard, told me about all the starving, orphaned children after the war. As she told me about the children ravaging through garbage heaps for food or wood to burn for heat she cried, sobbed as she remembered how awful the memory was. I also heard stories of the smells and ash in the air in the area around Dachau as the ovens cremated thousands.”
Seeing what I heard about, knowing my family was connected to it is something that a history book doesn’t prepare you for. Being able to connect on a personal level to what you’ve learned about and been passionate about your entire life holds an immeasurable value and truly encapsulates the impact and depth of my experience. Coming back, you see things differently. You see history and politics through a cultural and familial lens. You wonder if you may be connected to an event or place through your ancestors. I had learned to see things not just from an American view, but from a cultural view. How the past, present, and future is shaped by people’s identity, by who they are.
This also reminded me of something. Something I have reiterated and thought about since that trip. I had remembered to be self-aware of where we were, I forgot to be self-aware of who I was with. While Simon and his family had been willing to share their home and their stories with us, some of the things we talked about were difficult topics. It reminded me the importance of humility.
As I finished my time abroad, I kept this in the front of my mind when I went to places with historical significance or I asked my friends with cultural or historical ties to a topic we were discussing. As passionate or question-hungry you may be about something, remembering humility and self-awareness goes beyond being an American in Europe. Sometimes, it’s better to listen than to always have something to say. While I could have gone on and on about my knowledge of WW2, the Holocaust, or things I found fascinating (my grandmother as well), the value of building a relationship with my relatives came from listening to them, appreciating they had information and insight completely new to me. Sometimes the things you learn can’t come from a book; you have to open yourself up to context, people, and the world in order to communicate and connect.
There are so many more fascinating stories that have permanently changed our family’s knowledge of itself. I wish I could share them all. Since 2015, my grandmother has collected books her grandfather has written, letters, and photographs. All are pieces of a bigger puzzle of who we are. You can’t duplicate that and it can’t help but inspire you to be better, to be the best global citizen and family member you can be. It reminds you that there is no greater bond than the bond of family.
It was such a special thing to be able to share this experience with my grandparents and not only do I know that this is only one piece to my puzzle, I hope that I will be able to do this with my mother’s side of the family and my father’s father side.
I have to dedicate this to my grandmother because without her constant thirst for knowledge, none of this would have even been possible or existed in our world. I wanted to share her story, and hope that others can find the value in finding your family and discovering more than ever thought possible.