After reading about the new wave of interest in genealogy, I decided to visit a few ancestral history websites on the Internet. Except for the Mormon site, all the good ones appear to charge a fee. I was not motivated to pay a fee, and the Mormon website had no records of my surname, “Camuso.” Following my brief search, I wondered why I had so little interest in finding out more about my ancestral history.
I discovered the answer to my question when I learned some basic math about ancestors. If we skip over our two parents and four grandparents and go back just 20 generations, we discover that each of us has more than a million direct ancestors. What this means is that we are related to just about everyone!
The fact that most of us are related tends to minimize our sense of being different from others. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as being connected with a unique and distinguished family history. For instance, some Americans are proud of the fact that their lineage can be traced to ancestors who arrived from England on the Mayflower.
But how can a family tree be unique or distinguished if it excludes the vast majority of its members — if it includes only a small branch? What about the ancestors that came before the Mayflower settlers? Or the ones who lived before there was a land called England? Or the hundreds of generations before that? A small branch clipped from the top of a tree does not make a tree.
We may not like the fact that we all belong to one family, but I wonder if God made this decision to keep us from the false pride displayed (idol worship, really) when one boasts about a unique family heritage. Being related to just about everyone keeps us humble and is also consistent with being a Christian.
St. Paul teaches that “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Rom 12:5). The Bible also tells us that we are created in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:26). God wants us to know this so that we do not depend on our surname or family history for our identity or sense of belonging. In fact, our identity — who we really are — has nothing to do with our names. If you changed your name and moved to another city, your identity would not change. You would still be the same person, but with a different name.
Our true identity is that each of us is a beloved child of God. Our Creator, who knew us before we were born and who will know us after we leave this earth, provides us with the only identity we need. Our true identity is thus established not by our name or family genealogy, but by the soul God created in us.
From the moment of conception, our souls have a complete identity that needs nothing added to it, not even a name. We become aware of the richness of our souls' identity through the love we give to God and to others while we are here on earth. In other words, the more we love, the more the richness of our souls is revealed to us and to others.
In looking for my family history, I discovered that whether or not I could trace my roots was really not important to me. I felt a sense of freedom and relief that I didn’t have to depend on something God did not want me to depend on for who I am. And I found it quite humbling to discover I was related to just about everyone.
Instead of searching websites for deceased relatives, we might begin to see each person we meet today as a possible living relative on our family tree. And what a large tree it is, with branches that reach back not just a few generations, but with roots that extend all the way back to the clay God used to create Adam.
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