Michael Anderson

Ancestors

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Biography

I was born in Los Angeles in 1945, living first in West L.A. and then in the San Fernando Valley. My parents were Gordon E. Anderson, still serving as a pilot in the Army Air Corps at the time of my birth, and Peggy McGinnis, both of whom grew up in Los Angeles as well. I have a younger sister, Bonnie, and a younger brother, Don. All three of us graduated from James Monroe High School.

I went to college at Stanford, studying German literature and German and Greek philosophy, with the intention of becoming an academic, even as the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s played out around me. After a year at the University of Chicago and several years as a high school teacher outside Buffalo, N.Y., I resumed my graduate studies at S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, earning an M.A. in Classics on my way towards a doctorate which I never quite completed. A series of deferments kept me out of the military during the Viet Nam War.

Meanwhile, I married Serafin in 1972 and four years later moved to Seattle, where our twin sons were born in 1978. After another cross-country move, I finally abandoned my plans to enter academia and managed to get a job in computer programming. I worked as a software engineer for 19 years, living in New Jersey and New Hampshire.

After the death of one of our sons from leukemia in 1998, I returned to teaching, where I taught English, math, philosophy, and Ancient Greek in a private boarding-and-day Waldorf high school.

Since our retirements my wife and I have been able to travel quite a lot -- to Europe, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, as well within the U.S. and Canada.

My ancestors are predominantly from Sweden, Ireland, Wales, and England, with a small admixture from Germany, and only my Irish line -- my maternal grandfather's line -- arrived on this continent before the Revolutionary War. The vast majority of them are rather recent immigrants, stepping onto U.S. soil in the mid- to late-19th century. Most, one may speculate, had belonged to the lowest economic strata of European society.

Their stories are given to us in the vaguest of terms: she was a servant girl when she emigrated, he was a farmer with a house full of children, and so forth. Some were barely literate, few if any had access to formal education to the extent we nowadays take for granted. What was it like to be a laborer in a Welsh mining region 150 years ago? What was it like to be a farmer in Lincolnshire in the early 1800s? What was it like for a 21-year-old who had never ventured more than 20 miles from his or her birthplace to travel thousands of miles, unaccompanied, to a country whose language was incomprehensible?

Generic questions of this sort are not foreign to me, but suddenly they have become personal: I want to know the stories that belong to the names and dates that decorate my family tree. But it's too late. Those who could have told even a small part of the stories of long-dead ancestors are by now dead themselves. How much of all those stories can we hope to reconstruct?

Perhaps one's imagination can produce a plausible story, one that accounts for the few facts that have been accumulated. But that only exposes more and deeper questions. What was it really like to be the person with that name, born on that day in that village? What historical and interpersonal forces molded his or her existence? How did he or she respond to those forces in building his or her own unique and integral life?

It's all about the stories!

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Mike Anderson at registration and shortly thereafter.