Old photos of ancestors sometimes show fascinating physical resemblances: your deep-set eyes show up in a grandmother; your son’s school picture looks just like his grandfather’s at the same age. But what about skills, talents, interests? Is it possible to find similarities at that level? I love to hunt through a lineage for these deeper connections. Sometimes jobs repeat in the family tree. Is this nature exerting itself? A parental interest nurtured into the next generation? Or do opportunities present themselves in successive lifetimes, making it look like a trait or occupation “runs in the family”?
Take my husband’s line. In his case, I’m struck by a particular consistency in the men: an aptitude for building and fixing things that is strongly evident in Geoff, and was maybe even more so with his father, Don, who was a millwright at the General Motors foundry in St. Catharines. Don’s father Fred worked as a pipe-fitter and helped build the Sir Adam Beck-1 hydroelectric plant in Niagara Falls. Going back another generation, Fred’s father Alex was also a millwright. He worked for many years at a lumber mill in Parry Sound.
Alex’s father, John Duff, is the earliest ancestor I’ve found so far in the line. All I know of his working life in Scotland is that for a time, he was a spirits distributor in Glasgow. (Hmm. An echo to his five-times great-grandson the sommelier?) In Canada, John Duff first worked as a porter in Toronto, then a labourer in Simcoe, and then, for almost 30 years, John worked a farm in Muskoka.
This fact is fascinating for three reasons:
- I know about farming in Muskoka, where soil is thin and rock dominates in a back-breaking, heart-breaking way. John Duff, meet the Canadian Shield.
- John’s 200 acre plot of land sits less than a half-hour drive from where our cottage is today.
- Farming, or at least, growing things, might be another thread that can be followed through the Smith men’s lineage. John’s son Alex also farmed in Muskoka for over a decade before switching to engineering. Don loved to grow flowers and consistently promoted to me the benefits of “well-rotted manure.”
And how’s this for another connection – this one across six generations: Muskoka itself, which Don loved and where he built the cottage. Where unbeknownst to Don, his grandfather and great-grandfather were landowners too. And a place that Don’s son and his two grandsons cherish as much as he did.
Nature, nurture, opportunity? The next time you’re wondering where your skills and interests came from, consider taking the long view through your family tree!
I find as I get older I am more interested in both the past and the future – a feeling of looking for connections through time. My kids love it when I tell them that they are “just like” one of their aunts or grandparents. I wish I had more stories of my own grandparents to share – or someone to tell me that I was just like them. I didn’t even know my two grandfathers were both engineers – as I am – until I was well into my university degree. It’s amazing to me how quickly these kinds of ties can be lost – which is why it’s so important to me to record them now.