Legitimate Claims

Ancestry allows us to participate in a larger world, to experience vicariously the greener pastures of other lives, the exotic romance of far–away places, and the security of kinship with long–dead forebears who might have been rich and famous, poor and persecuted, saintly or notorious. Examining our ancestors can provide us with standards by which to judge ourselves, and add glamour to dull lives.

Like many children, I was often certain that I was adopted. I simply did not seem to fit in. My father was an attorney; his father was an oil company executive. My mother was a homemaker with a degree in education. Her father was a civil engineer; his wife was a homemaker, religions fanatic, and former Women’s Christian Temperance Union activist. While they were all down–to–earth and terribly practical, even from a young age I had a crazy, romantic bent. I would play music and compose simple (and simply awful) tunes, make silly rhymes, and invent whole casts of fantasy people to populate my life. I loved nature and saw her beauty in ways all others in my family would miss. I was also a tinkerer, constantly dismantling, repairing, reassembling, or (all too often) destroying some household convenience. My earliest stated ambition was to be a ballerina; it is said that the first word I uttered was “automatic.” Where did I get these disruptive tendencies? My father claims, in his own words, to “have trouble plugging in a light bulb.” The rest of the family fared little better. A search of the family libraries turned up shockingly little in the way of creative expression.

Even looking deeper into the family tree at first yielded little encouragement. The Risley family is reputed to be descended from the Earl of Risley, Risley being a little English town that has since been swallowed up by a sprawling London. There is some history there, of course: if such stories are to be believed, my progenitor earl was one of the financiers of the Mayflower expedition to the New World. Still, as royalty goes the House of Risley remained relatively undistinguished; my parents visited the ancestral home a few years ago, only to discover that it is currently being used as a home for wayward boys. Fitting, perhaps, but it hardly explains my love of nature and song, or my penchant for discovering the way things work. The early history of my mother’s branch of the family was fascinating, as well, but could hardly serve as evidence for my claims of legitimacy. They were French Huguenots, Protestants who were extensively persecuted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They eventually fled to Germany and America in search of religious freedom, and branches of the family include German tradesmen and a family of Baptist ministers.

Later in the history of the Bell family, though, I discovered a glimmer of hope, for my mother was descended from none other than Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Could this be, at last, evidence of my true heritage? An ancestor who not only possessed technical aptitude, but who was obsessed with communication as well, could explain a great deal about my inclinations. Perhaps I was not an orphan after all!

Not too long after that discovery, my strange behavior was the subject of a discussion at a Risley family gathering. As I recall the situation, my father was bragging about my achievements at a recent Boy Scout jamboree. Although I was never considered much of an athlete, and typically performed poorly in traditional sports, I had won a coveted prize in a jamboree event that combined a race and obstacle course with some wilderness survival skills. Frankly, the competition was not very tough, but my father was inordinately proud. My grandfather kind of laughed and said something about “he must take after Annie.” My grandmother, always vigilant when it came to the family honor, silenced him with an icy glance. It was some time later before I could piece together the story from bits and pieces that family members occasionally let slip out. It would seem that my grandfather’s grandfather had taken as a bride, in somewhat scandalous circumstances, a woman referred to only as Choctaw Annie, a full–blooded American Indian. To me, that was genealogical paradise. How often I had wished for Native American ancestors! How proud I had been to always wear the feathers when my childhood friends played Cowboys and Indians! Here, freed at last from her dark closet, was the skeleton of my dreams. This, at last, explained my strangeness; I was but the germination of wild oats sown a mere four generations back.

Perhaps the greatest reward we get from studying our heritage is a sense of belonging, a feeling that we are an intimate part of a larger whole. True, were one to search any American family tree long enough, it seems likely that relatives could be found whose traits supported almost any claim. That just might be the real joy of it all, however: “This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is in short supply.” (Heinlein, Robert Anson, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, 1978)

-- RonRisley - 29 May 1989