Someone Else's New Year

 

Last night, someone was pounding a drum in our neighborhood in celebration of the New Year. I can't exactly tell you which New Year is being celebrated right now, but it's someone else's celebration for a New Year from an entirely different calendar, the lunar calendar. While it could be the Chinese New Year, it could also be New Year for the Vietnamese, or the Koreans—or any of the other Asian roots claimed by my neighbors.

Living in a place which has been called one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States, it's not hard to gain an appreciation for the fact that different people celebrate differently, work differently, follow different customs and habits, even prefer different foods. But after we've lived here for a while, those differences seem to fade. First, perhaps, it's "fusion" cuisine which celebrates a blending of the old and the new, but eventually, we end up forgetting our roots. It's only been a few generations for me, but I couldn't tell you which holidays my paternal grandfather's Polish forebears celebrated, or even which foods they liked to eat on those festive occasions.

Perhaps that's what has brought about this call to re-discover our roots, to find out where we came from and what it was like to be not-American, to reach beyond hyphenated-American status to the rank of strangers from a strange land. For many people, the search doesn't involve more than a few generations.

For this coming month, though, my own search will diverge from that international research path to one which kept leading me back through local American documents. From generation to generation, sure the path skirted the borders and stepped just beyond civilization—but it did still tie my maternal line to American property. It's just when the paper trail grows dark, the going gets rougher. While I yearn to detect some signal of where this family originated, I keep missing the message.

February's goal for my Twelve Most Wanted will seek to find the roots for one of my third great-grandmothers, Delaney Rosella Townsend. When I last traced her back as far as I could in time, I found her in one of the least likely situations: young, single, and far from the supposed home of her parents. If it weren't for the one census record where I was able to find her, I wouldn't even have known where her parents supposedly lived. But this time is a new year, and a new opportunity to see that changed. This month is the time to trace that obscured route back home.