Journey back

you won't know where you might go if you don't get started

My sister Tiffany sent me this picture of my Great Grandmother Blanche Sugg Wade after last week’s newsletter. Blanche was an artist who grew up on a Tobacco farm and married a Tobacco farmer, and I have been doing research and learning about her side of my family.

My interest in genealogy is relatively new, having only began in the past three or four years. The discoveries about my family, and a period of focused reading and research about North Carolina history was enabled by this window.

Well, not the window itself, but where the window sits, and why I was peering out of it day after day, for a season. This is the view from the beautiful office that the Chair of the Academic Council at Duke University occupies, something that I did from July 2017 to June 2019, and this cloistered space allowed me to slow down, read, learn, think, process and write. What got started in this place has now morphed into two book projects, and those in turn helped nudge me toward becoming an artist. What an incredible privilege to have a job that allowed for this space—I try not to take that for granted.

This picture of our puppy Nemo captures the essence of what this space meant for me—a place for looking at the familiar, but in a new way to see what could be learned and understood afresh. Anticipating, wondering, reflecting and perhaps doing the unthinkable and changing ones mind about something important was what took place in this place.

I call the painting below “family” because of the links and roots that we have, one to another, whether we know each other’s names or not. And this painting works just fine regardless of which side is up. This Fall I assigned a semester-long project in an undergrad ethics course I taught that had the students answer “what does it mean to live an ethical life?” by learning about a relative who lived during the 1918 influenza pandemic, and wrestling with their life decisions. Had they lived ethical lives? Then I asked my students to imagine a relative of theirs whom they will never meet, looking back at their life today. Are they living an ethical life? The point is to encourage looking back, but through a lens of humility.

Reading these assignments made clear that the geographic distribution of my family is unusual. Some of my students struggled to document relatives, due to ancestors having been murdered in the Holocaust, been rendered invisible by Slavery, or having changed their name to assimilate, or being from a nation that did not have substantial online genealogical information online. I have taken for granted familial roots that are centered in a particular geography, a place. In one county, and for large swaths of time, on one or two farms.

We tend to think of discovery as being akin to finding the unimaginable breakthrough, like cold fusion as a way to drive our world without greenhouse gases, or translating the mapped human genome into a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease or Cancer. These are worthy endeavors, but there are many consequential discoveries to be found on the well trodden path, by glimpsing the every day in a new way. As George Orwell said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” and the idea of finding great insight in the wide open, even in a familiar landscape or situation, is a common refrain in the parables of Jesus—”he who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

This is a simple sketch I did of the house that Blanche Sugg, my Great Grandmother grew up in, and just below it is the actual house that has

been restored by a relative, and she lives there now. The photo of the house is from Fall, 2019.

This is the house that Blanche lived in at the 1900 Census when she was 2 years old, and the screen shot below, in which her name is highlighted shows an image of the actual Census document filled out more than 120 years ago.

The picture below comes from the Joseph E. Sugg (b 1830, d 1916) entry in ancestry.com, Blanche’s Grandfather and my Great 3x Grandfather and it could be the same house if the restored porch in the picture above was not fully restored. It is almost certainly on the same farm in any event even if it is not the same house.

The painting below is one that I did for my daughter Morgan, and I call it “journey back” and gave it to her as she moved back to Washington DC this past Fall after moving home to Durham for 14 months during the pandemic. You never know where a journey will go when you start.

Don Taylor