Songwriter Amy Ray of Indigo Girls included a snippet of a conversation she recorded with her grandmother, Frances Ozilline Walker1, at the beginning of this 1999 song that bears Ozilline’s name:
- Ozilline: He observed Saturday as the Sabbath.
- Ray: What kind of faith does that make him?
- Ozilline: He didn’t have one.
- Ray: Oh, okay.
- Ozilline: He didn’t believe in any one thing. He would go out in the street, and all of the kids would play the… with a drum-like thing. Some kind of an instrument. And, Momma played the organ. … She played that, and got a real big kick out of it.
Ozilline’s family was from Georgia, and she describes a faith tradition that had less to do with scholarly theology and orthodoxy than it did with community and expressions of joy. It sounds like the kind of faith tradition that would have given my own grandfather, Russ Clark, fits.
On one hand, her family’s obvious rejection of orthodox thinking would have been in line with his Southern Baptist emphasis on having a personal, individual relationship with God (instead of going through a priest or other human intercessor). On the other hand, he routinely mocked people who deviated from what he believed to be Biblical truth, especially if they seemed to lack any formal education or basic literacy in the Bible. He took a special delight in explaining to anyone who would listen just what people of other faiths “got wrong,” and explaining why they weren’t really Christian, even if they thought they were.
By the time I was 12, I had picked up this bad habit, and I would quarrel with classmates of different faiths in ways that I find embarrassing, now. As a non-believing adult, when I hear people describe the religious traditions they or their ancestors practiced, I make an effort to appreciate what their beliefs can teach me about them. I like to analyze how those beliefs might affect their behavior. But I’m also keenly aware of how easy it is to judge people unfairly for believing things that I don’t think are true, or to unintentionally make them feel judged.
I try to strike a balance where I avoid telling someone like Ozilline that their faith is somehow wrong, but I also have to be careful not to mislead them into thinking that my acceptance constitutes agreement.
As is always the case in genealogy and family history, we’re not talking about establishing any absolute truths. We’re talking about finding whatever facts we can find and understanding what we can understand.
Avoiding Controversy
In your private genealogical research efforts, you have no doubt found ways to compartmentalize the different faiths practiced by different families in different places and different times, but writing about those faiths is a trickier task, especially if living cousins still feel strongly about those faith traditions, or if you learn things that contradict what you have always believed.
Discussing religious faith or political convictions will always be a delicate business, no matter how neutrally or academically you try to broach the subject. The tangled nest of deeply buried, irrational biases that every human carries around with them is bound to lead to hurt feelings. Most of the time, saying nothing about a potentially divisive subject is the most prudent choice.
If you’re writing a relative’s biography, for example, you may simply record the fact of their membership in a local church. If their church was a bigger part of their identity, you might use words like “strong” or “devout” in that one-line mention, and leave it at that. But unless you have records or writings from them discussing their faith, you may be inclined to avoid digging deeper.
Sometimes, though, digging deeper and exploring unfamiliar beliefs is necessary to understand your ancestors. In the earlier essay “When Faith Divides,” I talked about the historical backdrop of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and how that history shaped the way modern Christian Americans think about their faith traditions.
I ended that piece after discussing some broad historical changes in what would be considered “mainstream” faith traditions, and posed a question:
This is where your personal beliefs may create a bias that makes it harder for you to understand the beliefs of your ancestors. Perhaps your grandparents converted from an older faith, and passed down acrimonious notions about that older faith to you. Will you be able to look past “that group is wrong and bad because they teach X” and understand your great-grandparents were really like?
Facts vs. Faith: Always a Losing Battle
Any genealogist can understand how easily a family legend can come to be accepted as fact, and how difficult it can be to find the evidence needed to support or refute the facts behind any given legend. Treasured beliefs about our origins are rarely based on facts and evidence, which makes it harder to prove or refute beliefs using facts. As the old saying goes:
“You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.”3
With American ancestors, it may be easy to identify which church they belonged to, but difficult to understand what that says about their personal beliefs. This is especially true if the church they identify with grew out of one of the revivalist movements of the mid-1800s.
The U.S. Constitution wisely prohibited the establishment of a state religion and provided for everyone to exercise their conscience. One result of this is that America’s history is full of stories of new religious movements (NRMs) that either grew out of mainstream faiths or arose in reaction to or opposition to them. Many of these new movements defined themselves as being part of a Christian tradition, sometimes even claiming to be the “real” church, returning after centuries of suppression in Europe.
Demonstrating that multiple groups who all claim to be “the real church” can’t all be correct shouldn’t be difficult or controversial, but it is both difficult and controversial to demonstrate that a particular group’s origin story isn’t supported by the historical record.
To use my own heritage as an example, the Southern Baptist church I was raised in was a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was established in 1845 by white Baptists who supported the continuation of slavery and did not support the ordination of Black pastors. Even though this is a well-established fact documented by both SBC and the “northern Baptists” at the time, most practicing Southern Baptists do not know this, and of those who do know, few are willing to accept it. In my teens, when I began to question my faith, and I learned about our history, my own father told me that it wasn’t true.
Dad, who was born 100 years after the documented historical events took place, urged me to ignore the historical documents that tied our origins to slavery and racial animus and accept a version of history in which we represented an oppressed, enlightened minority who had existed in the margins of that history, keeping the truth of the original early church alive.
As I have learned since my teens, every faith tradition4, no matter how recently they were established, maintains a similar, unofficial belief about its own origins. In every case, the historical record tells us that there were worldly, contemporary factors that led to their establishment or division from their parent body. And yet, depending on the faith group in question, they either ignore and minimize their history or they make accepting the unsupported story an article of faith. In some extreme cases, spreading the ahistorical myth of their origin is part of their practice of witnessing or evangelizing, and they use the reaction of nonbelievers (like me) as evidence that they are still being oppressed.
For a family historian, recording a person’s beliefs when those beliefs contradict the historical record can put you in a difficult position.
Restating My Thesis
Last week, I asserted this in my post about Michael Callen:
Anyone who does genealogy research has dozens of examples of children and adults in their family who were lost to yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough, and various kinds of pox. And if you look for it, you will probably find a connection between the religion your ancestors practiced and their fear of those diseases.
In case that wasn’t clear, I was trying to make a point about the broad historical context of life in the American Midwest, where communities were often isolated from each other and where neighbors of different backgrounds (whether ethnic, linguistic, or religious) had to figure out what the rules were for dealing with each other. Without the benefit of knowing how or why diseases were spread, outbreaks in these isolated communities were terrifying, and people were desperate for the kind of answers and comfort that religion offers.
I’m not here to tell anyone that their religion is right or wrong because of the circumstances that might have led to its founding. I’m just making the point that humans are rarely as rational as they like to think they are, and there is a powerful inherited trait in all of us that compels us to find explanations for how and why we experience what we experience.
And if that irrational story brings joy or peace in a difficult time, it may be hard to accept that there are more rational explanations for what we experienced than the ones we hold onto.
No Absolutes
Recording your family’s history should reflect who they were. That may come into conflict with other facts and evidence.
Sometimes, simply stating what they believed is enough. You don’t need a deep analysis of Ozilline’s faith to capture its essence. Other times, as with Grandpa Russ and his complicated relationship with his own faith and that of others, will require a more detailed and sensitive approach.
There is no real guidebook to navigating this subject. You need to use your judgment about what to say, arm yourself with the facts, and prepare to be wrong no matter how you handle the topic.
Now, let’s see if I can put that into practice as I prepare my next post, which will talk about a family that belonged to one of those new religious movements of the mid-19th century.
Wish me luck!
- https://www.lifeblood.net/songs/backgrounds/ozilline.html ↩︎
- Quote Origin: You Cannot Reason People Out of Something They Were Not Reasoned Into ↩︎
- I’m only using examples of Christian-based groups today, but this pattern can be found in every faith tradition. ↩︎
Mightier Acorns 
Say hello, cousin!