How ancestry.com helped me forgive my grandmother

Just as trauma is passed on from one generation to the next, so is resilience

“In the vesper hour of the quiet Sabbath twilight, tragedy stalked the streets of the little neighboring community of Cedar Bluff, claiming as death’s victims, Mrs. Labe Fralick, age 40, and her daughter, Odie Grace, age 15,” newspaper obituary published on April 30, 1933

I’m fascinated by the idea that we’re all shaped in some way by ancestors we’ll never know. That our relatives’ biology, learned behaviors and experiences trickle down through the generations and impact who we are today. We already know we’re influenced by the genes we inherit, but new research shows our ancestors’ exposure to hardships (like famine) or violence (like war or genocide) can leave their mark on us, too. This concept, called epigenetics, posits that the effects of trauma change how our genes work, and those changes are then transferred to following generations.

The maternal side of my family came to America in the early 1800s from Scotland and Germany, settling in Western Kentucky, a coal mining and farming community. They left behind everything they knew only to end up in America impoverished and uneducated – a circumstance that didn’t improve much over the decades. Based on what I’ve gleaned from Ancestry.com, very few of my Kentucky relatives ever graduated from high school, many of them intermarried among local families, and almost all of them died early from preventable causes.

But it was my grandmother’s past that had always piqued my curiosity. She was different from other grandmothers – overly sensitive, paranoid, frenetic, insecure. If she felt she was being left out of a conversation, she’d cry and accuse us of plotting against her. If anyone experienced joy of any kind, she’d try to quash it. If someone expressed displeasure with her behavior, she’d threaten to kill herself. I’m not a therapist, but, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure she had a personality disorder. But why?

When I was almost 50 years old – after my grandmother died – I hired a genealogist to dig into our family history. I hoped to uncover something in my grandmother’s past that would help explain her behavior. I deeply wanted to understand why she was the way she was. Or maybe I just deeply wanted to understand why I was the way I was.

I hired a researcher from Ancestry.com and told him what I knew: my grandmother had been born and raised in Caldwell, Kentucky, and her mother and sister were killed in a car accident when she was 10 years old. Then I sent him a few hundred dollars via Venmo. Three months later, I opened my mailbox and found a large yellow envelope. It was full of news clippings, obituaries, court documents, birth certificates, census records … and big T trauma.

It took a while to piece it all together, but what I learned was that my great grandmother, Hattie Maude Fralick (who was eight months pregnant), and her 15-year-old daughter, Odie Grace, were run over while walking to church. They were struck by a car full of drunk construction workers who left the scene of the crime. The collision killed my great grandmother instantly; her daughter was taken to a hospital where she died the next day.

The court records I’d received also revealed that the only penalty the drunk driver who killed them faced was a $100 fine. He told police he was drunk, but didn't go to court or to jail. In fact, Allan Hume Wallace went on to fight in World War II and was buried in Kentucky with military honors.

But the most bizarre and upsetting information I uncovered was that just three months after the tragic accident that killed his daughter and pregnant wife, my great grandfather remarried a woman who had three young children of her own.

While I understand my modern-day life in Northern California in no way resembles the hard scrabble existence of my ancestors in Trigg County nearly 100 years ago, I’m not sure how my grandmother – or any child – could have survived the trauma she endured unscathed. I suddenly started to see my grandmother as a 10-year-old girl whose mother and sister were stolen from her by a violent car accident. I imagined her trying to assimilate to a new stepmother and step-siblings while she and her siblings were still grieving.

Studies show a link between childhood trauma and the development of personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorders. For the first time in my lifetime, I began to feel empathy for Robbie Fralick, a little girl who endured so much and did what she had to do – and became who she had to become – in order to protect herself. In order to survive. And even though my grandmother is gone, I feel closer to her now than I did when she was alive. And maybe I now understand my mother and myself a little bit more, too.

I wished I’d asked my grandmother more questions about her life, but through my research project, I’ve come to understand the importance of uncovering and telling our families’ stories. The silence of our ancestors – either because of societal taboos or an inability to verbalize what they went through – has untold impacts on their children and their children’s children.

But just as trauma is passed on from one generation to the next, researchers say so, too, is resilience. When we share how we’ve survived and healed from the traumas in the past, we make it possible to change the future.