How Much of Ourselves Do We Inherit from Our Ancestors?
The perils and imperatives of looking upstream
The other day I came across a photo of the Bavetz family standing outside on Fourth Avenue in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, a stone’s throw from the Alleghany River, sometime in the early 1930s. I recognize my maternal grandmother, Marge, standing second from left between her two sisters. Although she’s probably around twenty here, she looks like an old soul, and strikingly like my mother. I recognize myself in her, too – not so much the features as something in the gaze, resolute but not prejudging. I showed the picture to my husband, who agreed. “I see a little of you in your great-grandpap, too,” Gary said. “The eyes.” I had noticed Tony Bavetz’s eyes also – deep set, downturned and heavy-lidded. I saw those same eyes in a photo on our refrigerator, me and Gary at a wedding last year.
Genetics and Epigenetics
At least since Gregor Mendel started tinkering around with his plants in the mid-nineteenth century, scientists have had some understanding about how traits can be passed from one generation to another. Only very recently, research has established that we can inherit not only genetic sequences but how our cells read those sequences. Although the science of “epigenetics” is still in its infancy (scientists don’t even agree on precisely what it includes), recent studies suggest that how our bodies behave – including aspects of our physical and mental health – may stem not just from our DNA code but from how our cells “express” certain parts of that code and not others. Conditions like radiation, pollution, and early childhood nurturing or lack thereof can cause epigenetic changes. While some of those changes may be reversible at the individual level, some can also be passed down, perhaps for several generations.
How much of ourselves do we inherit from our ancestors? As I study the life of one individual who heavily influenced U.S. immigration policy as a State Department administrator in the early twentieth century, I’m drawn to understand the people, places, and events that influenced his world view. That suggests a study of social and political events of the Gilded Age, certainly, but also the origins and values of the southern Ohio farm community that raised him. The founders of that community, two or three generations removed from the Rhineland, had finally found a place to build their version of the good life: a large farm, a close community, a Sunday worship of their choosing, the odd glass of cider or wine. Like their immigrant parents and grandparents, those Ohio settlers spoke mostly German, married among themselves, and observed holiday traditions from their homeland. For the most part, they neither joined English institutions nor sought to reform them. There was work to be done in the morning.
It can be dangerous to draw too many conclusions from an individual’s heritage. An infinite number of variables confound the analysis of why we are the way we are; no one could ever confidently assign a particular trait or habit to one’s culture or lineage. Moreover, attempts to define people by their genetics, particularly in the immigration context, ominously evoke “eugenics,” a pseudoscience that arose from the work of Sir Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century and was used to justify policies ranging in horror from race-based immigration quotas to forced sterilization to ethnic cleansing. I’m sensitive to the extreme dangers of overdetermining from heritage.
A Visit to Whiteoak Township, 1878
Still, no man is an island. Whether nature or nurture, I recognize three generations of my family in my teenage grandmother’s facial expression. Although I can’t say that Wilbur J. Carr supported immigration restrictions because of something in his cultural heritage, I also can’t understand him deeply without considering the community that shaped him.
The boundaries of that insular German-speaking community had eroded by the time Carr was born in 1870. His generation didn’t understand their grandparents’ Pennsylvania Dutch, and they married their new neighbors (like the Carrs, whose ancestors probably hailed from Scotland).
But certain qualities – like the stoicism that suffuses Carr’s private journals – seems traceable to the values of that community. For example, in April 1878, the town doctor declared in the local newspaper that he had assaulted a visiting preacher in front of the Union Church only to defend himself from the preacher’s calumny. The following week, a carefully-worded letter appeared in the paper, signed by seven members of those original German settler families: Ruble, Kibler, Stout, Feeder, Surber, Boyd, and Carr’s grandfather, John Fender. Noting Dr. Moore’s letter to the editors of the prior week, the authors stated,
[w]e claim that the Doctor has not made a true statement of the facts of the outrage or difficulty referred to in his card. We do not wish to take sides with either of the parties referred to, further than truth and justice demand, but for the sake of the cause of Christ, and for the respect we owe to those who stand up for the cause of Christianity, we are compelled to say in behalf of Elder Bingman, that his conduct was not as the Doctor represented.
Dr. Moore would soon find himself at the center of extreme disturbance in this small community – busted for illegal distilling and shot by his co-defendant, who claimed the doctor had sexually assaulted the man’s wife. Through it all, the founding families of Whiteoak revealed neither opinion nor emotion. When Dr. Moore and his family left town, they publicly wished him well.
A Detailed Portrait
How much of who we are did we receive from those who came before us? How much does our heritage influence how we react to complex issues of our day, like the problem of displaced persons across Europe after World War I or a surge at the border today? The answer is unknowable, and in a democracy it ultimately doesn’t matter: Democracy presumes all of us capable of analyzing the facts and arguments, making rational decisions, and voting for the candidates we think will pursue our version of the good.
In reality, we know that human beings and our decision making processes are never this tidy. We’re influenced by all sorts of things – our health, our environment, our family. Understanding someone’s influences doesn’t explain or excuse their decisions, but it does allow us to see them in finer detail. From that intimate portrait, perhaps we might find ourselves with greater empathy – for their challenges, their failures, their humanity. And when we empathize, we see just a little of ourselves in them, too - regardless of how we got here.