Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Ancestry.com. It started out as a strategy to replace my obsessive intake of news and social media. But, there was more. Perhaps it was the upheaval surrounding buying and selling homes, or maybe it was the words and actions coming out of the election season, but I also felt a sudden urgency to know that I belong. Somewhere. Anywhere. What I now appreciate more fully than ever is that I belong to the community of family and friends that I have acquired throughout my life. I belong to the people who love me, and to the places that accept me. I belong exactly where I am.
Back to Ancestry, can tracing your dead relatives really help connect you? As it turns out, there are worse approaches. If nothing else, through the effort I learned some interesting pieces of my history. On my father’s side, so far I’ve traced my lineage back to Clement Briggs, who was born in 1587 in the English town of Southwark, Surrey, now part of London. He made one of the voyages to America and later died in 1648 in Weymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony. A grandson, John Briggs, was born in Kingston, Rhode Island in 1668, just 30 years after Roger Williams founded Rhode Island to escape the religious zealotry of the Puritans back in Massachusetts. John’s descendants would be native Rhode Islanders all way down through my father and older brother. Thanks to the fact that my parents hated cold weather, I broke a nearly 300-year trend by starting life in Winter Park, Florida.
On my mother’s side, I discovered that my great grandfather, James Gorman, was born in County Roscommon, Ireland in 1873. This part of Ireland was particularly ravaged by the great potato famine of the 1840s. Today, County Roscommon is the home of the Irish National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park. My great grandfather immigrated to the United States at just 17 and later settled in Providence where he met and married my great grandmother, another Irish immigrant. Their eldest daughter, my grandmother, was born in 1903.
Fast forward to 2017. I live in Baltimore with my spouse. I’ve chosen to make Maryland my home for 13 years because I love the land and the water and the history and the people of this great state as if I were a native. It seems as if Maryland’s “middle temperament” suits me just fine. I belong here. But, I also love and feel connected to my family and friends throughout the United States and beyond. I know that I belong to this particular group of particularly amazing people because they love and accept me as completely as I return that love and acceptance. Finding one’s place is important and may take you around the world or just around the block. Regardless of how and where you find that connection, it’s important to celebrate all the people in your life who help you belong. Wherever you may be or wherever you may be going.
