Looking Over the Family Tree

I come from a very long line of very short people.

This doesn’t really come as any surprise, since I remember spending a great many family occasions staring at the tops of people’s heads and I am not someone who was ever in line for any basketball scholarships. I am, in fact, maybe a finger’s width taller than the national average for American men these days – a fact I attribute entirely to my dad, who brought much-needed height into the family when he married in. My brother is maybe an inch taller than I am. After that things tail off rapidly.

I had two great-aunts who weren’t ten feet tall combined, even in their prime. Even in heels.

I’m slowly getting back into my genealogy project after a rough semester of frantic grading. It’s fun for me, all the detailed archival work. I finally bit the bullet earlier this month and bought my own Ancestry account and transferred the entire handwritten family tree that I created in 2018 – all 403 names of it – into my account. I know there are errors in this – I sent out the handwritten tree and got some feedback along those lines – so my next step is to go through all of the information I have and enter it in, making corrections as I go.

I love this sort of project. Kim says it makes her skin itch to think about it, and that’s why she spent last week redoing the living room floor while I was researching – between us we’re an entire person, and that’s what marriage is all about really. I was available for tall and/or heavy work, plus removing nail strips. Kim answers my questions about her side of the family. It all works out.

The first information I put in came from a box of physical documents that I inherited from my grandparents, and it was nice to get them attached to the right people on the tree. Now I’m going through the “Family Research” folder on my computer, document by document, adding the information as I stumble across it.

The third document down in that folder was a manifest from the ship that brought my great grandmother over from Sicily at the turn of the 20th century. That’s how I saved it, anyway. But now that I have the entire tree mostly mapped out (at least from her generation forward), I recognized a few other names who were on that ship.

Her sister and her niece sailed with her, for example, as did several people with my great-grandfather’s surname and at least one other with her own surname. They all came from two tiny little villages in northern Sicily, just west of Messina – villages that may well have been left abandoned by the time WWI rolled around if the rate of emigration held steady, though I know they still exist today so perhaps people moved in. They all moved to a half-mile-square section of South Philadelphia where pretty much everyone was related to them.

The manifest lists all sorts of random information about these people – why the US immigration officers cared about these things is an interesting question. How old each arriving person was. Single or married. Occupation. Literacy. Did they pay for their own ticket? If they had less than $50 cash with them, how much exactly did they have? Where were they going? (Many were heading toward family members who were already here - I recognized a few names and addresses in Philadelphia.) Where did they live before? And at the end there is a broad physical description – height, complexion (“black,” “natural,” and “pale” being the most common entries for all of these Sicilians), eye color and hair color (both overwhelmingly “chestnut”), identifying features, and height.

My great grandmother was 5’3” and she was on the upper end of this group. I extracted information for all of the people who came from those two villages on that ship, and the tallest were two men, one 24 and the other 36, who were 5’5”. The shortest – a 20-year-old man – was 4’6”.

We forget these days how good we have it when it comes to food.

Sicily at the start of the 20th century was a poor and hungry place, where calories could be hard to find. Most of human history is like that. We live in an age of unimaginable plenty compared with the world of our ancestors and our height reflects this nutritional bonanza.

Although even so, we’re still not planning on starting any basketball teams in my family any time soon.