Jay Sullivan asked if I could write a story on how knowing history can help us with our current interactions with people. I had to think really hard on this one. My brain strains very easily. I generally steer clear of writing articles that try to improve other people. I leave that to newspaper editors. The subject borders more on philosophy and religion. Questions that men have been trying to understand before writing began. They couldn’t fix us, what can I say? I will just attempt to tell you what history research has taught me personally. It falls under the category of wise words the young shrug off and the old don’t want to listen to.
While researching family trees, I always have to be aware of where each generation lived and the surrounding culture, ethnicity, shifting political borders, and events that motivated families to move. You could say I am putting labels on people, even profiling. This is true. If a policeman uses a profile today to single out someone on a lonely highway near the Texas-Mexico border, innocent people could be pulled over and searched. Profiling is a tool that can be misused, like any other tool. That same officer could use profiling to correctly identify someone acting nervously in a bank as a robber. That’s profiling based on behavior, not race.
On a side note, every wave of immigration has always been met with objections from those already in place. Fear of losing jobs, diluting the family bloodlines, you name it. Pocahontas’ dad probably thought the neighborhood was going to the dumps when John Rolfe arrived to date his daughter. History shows us that all new immigrants have added something to our cultural mix and helped us build a nation. What would we have missed if Alexander Graham Bell had stayed in Scotland?
History gives us a 20/20 vision in retrospect. In genealogy, profiling can help in finding a family who moved from a Kentucky backwoods log cabin to Indiana, to Sangamon County, Illinois. Thousands of white, poor, land-hungry people followed this same Western migration, along with Thomas Lincoln and his young son, Abraham.
To understand history is to understand people. The two can not be separated. Studying families as they travel in history is fascinating to me. It has sparked an interest in my daily life to want to know more about people I meet, and where they come from. “Your accent has me puzzled. Are you from Australia?” Everyone we meet for the first time is met with a filter we all have, prejudice. We pre-judge people based on our own experiences, often clouded by negative or positive things others have told us. I am as guilty as anyone in profiling or pre-judging people.
The lesson I wish to teach is that when meeting new people, we can either use our observations to spark an interest in knowing more about this new, different person or we can choose to block or dismiss them at first glance. When we start to make a conscious effort (yes, it takes effort) to know the person behind the face, prejudices fall away, and compassion takes its place. To misquote Mark Twain, KNOWLEDGE OF PEOPLE is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Do I like all the people I meet? No, but I prefer to make up my own mind rather than listen to what someone has passed on to me as gossip. I am still learning about people.
By ED PECK
