Long before I wrote the award winning book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, I was a genealogist, a family history researcher. I hate to say this out loud, because it makes me feel very old, but I have been researching families, my own and others, for 40 years now. Forty years of stories, of uncovering the past, of digging into history to find forgotten or purposely buried bits of someone’s legacy. If you haven’t already surmised during your time here on earth, let me be the first to tell you, there is no such thing as a “normal” family. I’m not even sure why, at this stage in human development, we still strive to attain whatever we think “normal” is. If history is any indicator, it’s an elusive goal.

This was never more evident to me then this week when I was working on a family history project for someone. The bits and pieces I began collecting were, to say the least, traumatic, absolutely horrifying in the emotional turmoil that I could sense must lay behind the cold hard facts listed in the documentation. As I’ve said often in describing my efforts at fictionalizing historical events, I am ever mindful that I’m dealing with real people. Such was the case this week as I sifted through the remnants of what could only be described as tragic. There were real people behind these names. Real people with real emotions, real struggles, real hurt and real lasting pain.

In speaking later with the person for whom I was researching the term “generational trauma” came up in our conversation. I first became aware of this term a few years ago from my daughter who works in the mental health field. I found her description of it interesting and began to ponder my own immediate generations and how their lives had all unfolded. Fascinating. But as a family history researcher my thoughts went further back, beyond my parents, my grandparents and even my great grandparents. Before I knew it I was well into the 1400’s and I had found one traumatic event after another in each generation. I remember saying to my daughter, “We really are a family of overachievers. We’ve been messed up for over 600 hundred years!”

From substance abuse to suicides to unfaithful partners that tore marriages apart. To parents that died young leaving children adrift to family estrangements that lasted 50 years. In one case the parents dying without ever knowing that their son was in fact alive, well and living only a couple hours from them. There were out of wedlock pregnancies, marriages that were denied between young lovers based solely on religious differences. Newborn babies given away to extended family members, the mothers shipped off to far away places expected to start fresh. Sexual preferences that were suppressed in a time less open then ours is now. There were men marrying women who were already pregnant with another man’s child, yet raising that child as their own. There were men returning as war veterans with the associated PTSD we know of today, that brought emotional instability and violence into their homes. There was poverty, food insecurity, and hardships beyond anything we can fathom today in a time without government services. And all of this was just in the past 100 years!

Looking back even further into my family tree I found loss and trauma from the Civil War, on both sides of the conflict. A murder in a moonshine deal gone bad, and its associated prison escape and ultimate death of the accused in a gun battle with law enforcement. I found a woman literally snatched from her home and carried off on horseback in a hail of gunfire in what can only be accurately described as a shot gun wedding! I found a ship’s captain who’s own wife died while he was away at sea. The crushing sadness and emotional trauma causing him to take his own life by walking off the deck of his own ship, sinking into the depths of the sea, on his next voyage, all of his children now orphans. A woman who gave birth to twin sons with one of them, Daniel, dying shortly after birth. Not uncommon in her time period, but she continued to name 3 subsequent sons Daniel, all of them dying within a year of birth, before she finally gave up using the name. Who was Daniel and how much did she love him? Another young woman married at 14 years of age, giving birth to her first child at age 15, again not uncommon in her time period. What makes her story stand out is over the next 20 years she gave birth to fifteen children and then died of a heart attack at age 35. Fifteen children with no mother. Imagine the emotional instability in that household.

And on and on the stories went, through men killing other men with their bare hands during the Revolutionary War, to early settlement of New England and the loss of life from unexpected brutal attacks. To immigration in a new world and one ancestor in particular who appeared so often in the court records of the Plymouth Colony, for terrorizing his own family and others, that it was obvious he suffered from mental health issues. (side note, he had such an unusual name that I used it in my next book!) From there we go back to medieval England and the difficulties and barbarism that we know had to have existed in every day life. Although the paper trail became more and more sparse the further back I went, it was evident to me that “normal” had been replaced with “traumatic” in every generation of my family.

This deep dive into the concept of generational trauma within my own family showed me that clearly LIFE in general is traumatic for everyone, in every generation. As the saying I so often see on social media states, “Be kind to everyone you meet because you have no idea what they are going through.” This proves to be so true when you look at the lives of your ancestors, the generations that came before you, beyond your immediate relatives that you are familiar with. Everyone, in every generation suffers through something. Our time is not unique.

And as is so often with me, while I pondered these thoughts this week I stumbled across another quote. “As you focus on clearing your generational trauma, do not forget to claim your generational strengths. Your ancestors gave you more then just wounds.”

I loved that! That’s why I’ve put it in bold print! It’s so true, because among all of that trauma in my family tree were people who survived. Who did hard things and overcame them. Who settled a brave new world, Founders of many of the towns in Maine that some of you call home. They battled though loss, difficulties, abuse, trauma, all of it to create lives for themselves, that although difficult, were productive lives just the same. In my family tree I have leaders of national organizations and leaders in industry, renowned religious leaders, medical professionals and ordinary folk who shaped the future of the communities they lived in. There are musicians, artists and now even an award winning author.

As I sat and thought about this, ancestral strength, the flip side to generational trauma, I realized it was all down to how you perceive the life you are living. As I’ve said so many times, I believe we create our own realities. You can either focus on the negative or you can focus on the positive. The choice is yours. Trauma is real, many people now and in the past will and have endured it. The take away here is, none of us are alone, everyone traverses a similar road. Kindness, positivity and understanding will serve us all well.