When the pandemic first hit, most people probably turned to a wholesome, enriching hobby. Knitting, perhaps, or spending time with the family dog outside — something nice, and a normal way to cope with the lockdown. I, however, chose to spend my time in the dark, quiet hours of the night hunched over my laptop deciphering the loopy, cursive French of distant ancestors’ death certificates.
In the pressing void where my usual amalgamation of French Club meetings, state viola competitions and lacrosse practices would be — after cranking out my precalculus and physics homework for the week — I would dutifully log into Ancestry.com to build out my family tree. I began three years ago, and as of today, there are about 9,730 individual “people” in the tree. After an offhand comment from my mother one afternoon about how one of her cousins was trying to (unsuccessfully) trace our Irish heritage back further than four generations, my ears perked up. I asked her if she had an account and if she remembered her password, begged her for a free trial of Ancestry Pro to be a “real genealogist” and dove right in.
I’d stay up till 1, 2 or 3 in the morning, eyes burning as I tried to translate birth records from the Basilica of Ste. Anne de Detroit to figure out what year a certain branch of her family graced Detroit’s ribbon farms. Particular highlights included scrolling through sketchy blogs dotted with blurry JPEGs of people with haunted expressions and high collars, a Belgian cabinetmaker’s passport application upon arriving at Ellis Island and my newfound immediate search bar autofilling of FindAGrave.com upon entering the letter “F.”
At one point, I even contacted the Daughters of the American Revolution to corroborate if an ancestor was a lieutenant or captain in the Revolutionary War, corresponding with a lovely woman named Grace whom I unceremoniously ghosted upon moving into South Quad Residence Hall my freshman year. (I still occasionally receive emails from her asking if I’m still interested in “joining the family”).
In the early months, the best way I can describe my fascination was as a frenzy. It was a pure, unadulterated obsession with finding and verifying stories and wills and housing deeds, all abetted by my new hours (and hours) of free time. There was so much to learn, so much to uncover — the pseudomystery of any rabid mystery-genre fan’s dreams.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about a larger family past I’d felt vaguely disconnected from. I knew the origins of my last name and mother’s maiden name, sure, and I spent holidays, birthdays and school concerts with my maternal grandparents and aunts. But beyond that, I didn’t feel an overwhelming sense of belonging, of knowing where, exactly, the roots of my past came from — especially on my dad’s side.
I knew the basics: He was the second youngest of six children, his family had a fascinating preoccupation with the name Francis (his grandfather, father, sister, brother and even his son had the name Francis incorporated into their full name in some way), and he was from Redford Township near Detroit. His father, a night patrolman for a local Ford plant, died the Christmas Eve after my sister was born, and his mother moved to Winter Park, Florida, soon after. He lived on Gaylord Street (then a dirt road) off 8 Mile, crammed in a shoebox-sized house. Whenever my siblings and I would complain about having to go to swim team practice or whose turn it was on the Big Wheel, he’d remind us in a grandfatherly fashion how he was too poor to have a Big Wheel or a park with a pool — his version of a pool was filling a bucket with water from a hose.
We also didn’t talk to, celebrate holidays with or otherwise acknowledge his side of the family — the paternal cousins and aunts and uncles I’d never met. I never really questioned it growing up, as my maternal grandparents were amazing; their adoration, time and presence more than made up for it. Besides, they were that much more present because they were closer, I’d rationalize to myself in the car as we drove past the Detroit Zoo to their house on Friday nights.
Even though my dad’s childhood home was just an additional 15 minutes away.
Compared to what I knew about my mother’s side of the family, the discrepancy was night and day. We had two bound books, enclosed with peeling bits of tan and green construction paper, detailing my mother’s Belgian roots in the living room buffet — my grandfather’s pharmaceutical scales in a glass container on the mantle — and plenty of “-isms” that were passed down. My dad thought he might be German, but knew he had to be French, too, because what other background would the last name “Parent” have? My mom’s sixth great-grandfather had 33 children and traded with Chief Pontiac. My dad swore he had a cousin named Gary, or maybe Jerry, or potentially Carter.
When I attended one of my cousin’s weddings via Zoom during that pandemic summer, crammed around my mom’s laptop in the dining room with my parents, sister and vaguely disinterested teenage brothers floating around behind us, I continued to think about the difference between my two families. Nearly 50 people from my mom’s family were muted on Zoom, calling into a wedding in Nebraska, and I didn’t even know how many paternal cousins I had.
I watched as my dad leaned closer to the laptop screen so his clapping became visible. No matter how bleary eyed I was for my 9 a.m. AP Environmental Science Zoom classes, the late nights of digging and fact finding were worth it. With every new bit of my larger ancestral story I discovered, from the church in Pennsylvania some ancestor helped build to the brothers that served in the Union Army, it was as if a tiny engine inside me thrummed and sparked to life, urging me to keep looking — to keep digging, to just scrub one more census record or World War I draft card to fully capture the microcosms of these lives that were long passed.
On a much bigger level, my goal was to collect enough facts about my dad’s history to balance out the wealth of love we knew and received from my mom’s side. Because, after all, didn’t he deserve that, too? To have parents that played cards with him, rather than saying they were “too tired” when approached with Tigers tickets won in a Little League raffle, or siblings that didn’t pretend to not recognize him in the Apple Store?
If these people didn’t want anything to do with someone as great as my father — my father, who watched all my field hockey games, even when I rode the bench as team manager, who cried upon reading the phrase “leaders and best” in my acceptance letter to the University of Michigan, who never missed a birthday, orchestra concert or a wish goodnight — I could care less about them. Fine with me.
As I exhausted my mom’s side of the family tree, I began to try to piece together my dad’s spotty history, accepting any profiles that popped up after undergoing my rigorous background check and verification (see: combing through census data). For all the Beaubiens and Campaus on my mother’s side, there was great-grandfather Melvin Americus, distant great-grandfather Lightfoot John and, of course, a father-and-son Thomas Jefferson duo.
It was nothing less than fascinating to me that centuries of stories — many that I had to seek out myself in the middle of the night — are still unfolding today. These threads are present in the way I talk (too fast), the shape of my nose (my father’s and his father’s father’s) and my eyebrows (my paternal grandfather’s). Though I have been so far removed from one side of my family, I unknowingly carry these invisible markers and stories of my father’s side with me, connecting me to something bigger than myself.
I have access to this information due to privilege and luck. There are so many people whose records are lost, who don’t have the ability to sift through centuries of records, archives and genealogical documents to discover stories about my family is not a luxury that most others are afforded.
Late one afternoon, after regaling half the family with my updated list of presidential-inspired names on my father’s side of the family, he came to me with a request — there’d always been a rumor that a woman in his family had some kind of affair, and he wanted to see if I could get to the bottom of it. After I cleared the stars from my vision and tampered my excitement at being tasked — finally — with a mystery to be solved, I spent the next four hours camped out at the dining room table corroborating dates, housing deeds and household details on various 1950s census files.
Though my search felt fruitless, all I could gather was that she married two men and a son appeared sometime between the two marriages; I noticed the gleam of excitement in my dad’s eye when I came back with my report. Here was something — a concrete answer — to a familial past and relationship clouded with so much ambiguity.
Even as I dove further into the German, American and various French branches of his ancestry, with every additional Jean-Paul, Jean-Olivier or James Madison I discovered, I wanted to find more. To find more answers for him, to have more concrete accomplishments, lineage and traces he could point back to. Though undoubtedly cool, we already knew quite a bit about my mom’s side of the family. Selfishly, I wanted my father to have something to brandish in the face of ribbon farms and ancestral dinners with Chief Pontiac, something to prove his merit besides guesstimates on how many cousins he had.
In all my three years of digging, the biggest discovery I have made leads to a tiny creek in Elmwood Cemetery on Detroit’s east side. There, tucked in a clearing of trees, is a crumbling, cinderblock stone bridge with a tall Michigan historical marker, denoting it as the spot of “Parent’s Creek.” (Officially, it’s the location of the Battle of Bloody Run in 1763, but I’ll spare you my historical waxing.)
After begging my dad for years to visit both the cemetery, filled with distant relatives, and the creek itself, we finally had the chance to go over winter break. After meandering through the rows and rows of tombstones, obelisks, monuments and crypts of various auto barons, we parked the car in front of the historical marker.
As I seized the opportunity to unload my weeks of research about this creek and its connection to our family on my brother beside me — how the namesake of Parent’s Creek was one Joseph Parent, like my father, and this was likely part of his original land — I watched my dad for a reaction. Here we were, stopped a few feet in front of the most significant piece of proof of his parental heritage (literally).
I watched as my dad grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the decrepit little bridge leading to nowhere, tucking it in his pocket as my brother turned to ask when the creek was named. My dad echoed his question, and after a moment, he grabbed his phone again to send the photo in the family group chat.
In that moment, I gathered not from his words but from his actions — the same way his support in my childhood rang louder than anything he had ever said — what this creek, this tangible piece of history, meant to him. Maybe it wasn’t that flashy; maybe it wasn’t as cool as the oldest cabin in Detroit. But it was something. It was something that was squarely and only his.
Now, though much of my genealogical sleuthing days are behind me, I revel in the chance to share my findings with friends, other family members and, really, anyone who is willing to listen. Rather than heading to the ancestor who sired 33 kids in Detroit or to the one who was the governor of New France, I make sure to hover over a small, blue square near the bottom of the family tree. A square that’s directly above my designated square. I zoom in on the thin line bridging the gap between the two of them.
“That’s my dad, right there.”
Statement Columnist Charlotte Parent can be reached at cmparent@umich.edu.