When people ask me where I’m from, it gets complicated. I say, “Well, we moved around a lot. I grew up mostly in Michigan.” However, Michigan was just where my nuclear family lived on and off when not overseas, there were no relatives nearby, and we moved away before I finished high school. In fact, the place that felt most like home to me was the San Francisco Bay Area, my chosen home as an adult for over twenty years; it was so eclectic that I fit in. And then I moved to Canada.
It is hard to return home if you don’t know where that is. Home becomes wherever you have the personal connections of family and friends—and that changes over time.
It is possible to investigate genealogy though. My own roots in America are part of mass European migrations in the 1800’s—my great-grandparents came from the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland and Germany. My grandparents were born in Minnesota, Colorado, Ontario and Chicago and grew up speaking English. My parents were born in Chicago and Colorado, moved to New York and California, and met each other in China. By the time I came along, the origin stories and traditions were distant history and there were no connections to Europe.
My partner Sally’s brother was keen on genealogy and managed to connect with relatives on the Mosel River who turned out to be wine makers with a long and interesting history—and who greeted her and her brother with a brass band parade when they returned to the valley. Hard to beat that for a homecoming.
She prodded me to look into my own roots, and within a decade or so we had figured out where my great-grandparents had emigrated from, and even visited. There were no parades, but we did meet a few people from the family tree, saw old houses and farms, and visited small towns I had never heard of before. It was curiously satisfying to see those places and feel the presence of history. It made my own moving around seem less unusual.
In fact, the more I learn about the movements of people throughout the world–even back to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens roots in Africa–the more it seems that migration is the norm, not the exception. It also strengthens my understanding that, in a deep sense, home is this earth for all of us. It doesn’t answer how we can continue to live here.
