The stories in our DNA
What if primary sources have the power to unlock memories that have been intentionally suppressed?
I’ve had almost 40 years to find a good answer for the “what are you?” or “where are your ancestors from?” questions, but I still fumble my reply. I usually settle for some joking response like “Oh, I’m a mutt.”
Several of my ancestral branches sailed over from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the first years after the Mayflower. When my husband and I honeymooned on Nantucket, I discovered that my Brown ancestors settled themselves in Rhode Island and New Jersey, founding Brown University and running a spermaceti candle company. Nicolas Brown, the spermaceti chandler, plied his trade in the same area as my husband’s Nye whaling ancestors.
I traced another branch of the family tree back to North Carolina enslaver Jobe R. Hall, a man listed with 17 enslaved persons in the 1850 United States Census Slave Schedule. One of the 5 enslaved women older than 13 was likely the mother of Miles Hall, my great-great-grandfather.
Other family legends proved unverifiable. Both my mother and father claimed indigenous heritage, but I found no evidence to support that genealogy. I was told as a child that my great-great-grandmother Edith Hamm was a German Jew who emigrated from Germany before WWII, but census records appear to show that she was born in Philadelphia and that her family had been in the United States since at least the 1840s.
As an archivist, I frequently work with genealogists. They are usually women because women are socialized to be the family memory-keepers. We ask women to carry the family’s future in their wombs and the family’s past in their heads. But it is not just women who carry family history—we all hold generations of stories in our DNA. As epigeneticists who study influences on gene expression have revealed, trauma is passed through DNA for multiple generations.
Descendants of people who experienced war, famine, and enslavement show different DNA markers from people whose ancestors led comfortable lives. Rachel Yehuda, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, describes one of her research teams’ breakthroughs: “In 2015 our group became one of the first to pinpoint epigenetic changes on stress-related genes of veterans with PTSD. These alterations partially explained why trauma's effects were so persistent, lasting for decades.”
Even childhood maltreatment can leave intergenerational traces. In a recent study on intergenerational transmission of maternal childhood maltreatment prior to birth, the researchers note:
“Childhood maltreatment is a potent risk factor for developing psychopathology later in life. Accumulating research suggests that the influence is not limited to the exposed individual but may also be transmitted across generations” and that “pregnant women’s experiences of childhood maltreatment may be reflected their offspring’s brain development in utero.”
As a mother who experienced childhood maltreatment in a large Quiverfull family, this research is slightly terrifying when I think about my son’s future. Fortunately, our fate is not fixed by the DNA we inherit. Yehuda reports,
“some of these stress-related and intergenerational changes may be reversible. Several years ago we discovered that combat veterans with PTSD who benefited from cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy showed treatment-induced changes in FKBP5 methylation. The finding confirmed that healing is also reflected in epigenetic change.”
In another research review, Yehuda concludes, “the principle of epigenetic plasticity implies that changes to the epigenome might reset when the environmental insults are no longer present, or when we have changed sufficiently to address environmental challenges in a new way.” (emphasis mine)
Any therapist will tell you that many different forms of psychotherapy are appropriate for addressing the impact of trauma. I’m no therapist, but as an archivist who spent decades intentionally suppressing memories, I suggest that primary sources--photos, genealogy records, home videos--are the perfect threshold into processing intergenerational trauma.
What if primary sources have the power to unlock memories that have been intentionally suppressed? What if primary sources are a key to epigenetic change?
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/pdf/WPS-17-243.pdf
Wow, this is a lot to process. Thanks for sharing!