A friend recently told me about her daughter’s school project to draw her family tree. The assignment ignited my friend’s interest in genealogy, and what started as homework assistance has become an intricate and rewarding hobby for her. I’m tempted to emulate my friend and spend my free time scrolling through various online databases or digging through archives, looking for who I come from and where my distant relatives are now. But I know, in my case, I’d probably hit a lot of dead ends.
Most of my family’s records, if they exist, would likely be in Syria and other parts of the Middle East, and it’s hard for me to know where to even start looking. I’d have to do my research in Arabic, which isn’t my strongest language. I’m certainly not alone in this predicament. In the age of DNA tests and sites like ancestry.com, amateur genealogy is supposedly more accessible than ever. But it often takes far more work to build a family tree than simply swabbing a cheek or looking up names—especially for those whose families were torn apart by war, colonial conquests, and genocide. In North America, institutional—and often colonial—record keeping obscured the intricacies of Indigenous family relationships. That’s not to mention those whose lives weren’t considered important enough to be documented. Memories are unreliable in many ways; there are those whose family members would rather not speak of the past.
