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When I returned from vacation with her grandparents, my oldest daughter brought a homemade family tree in her luggage. On A4 sheets glued together, the names were shown grouped between braces. My in-laws spanning four generations. Then she asked me to help her do the same thing with the daycare branch and I got really angry. I can’t get over my grandparents again, and even then I had a few moments of doubt about their names. I have always found genealogy particularly boring.
However, I understand my daughter’s desire. Knowing where you come from, anchoring yourself in a lineage, putting down roots… Looking at those scribbled names, I wondered who was hiding behind them. The question my daughter asks me is not only intended to establish a list of surnames. He wants to give them life, to make the characters emerge in relief from his A4 sheets. Who are your great-grandparents? Where did they grow up, how did they fall in love, what did they like to eat? What did they do during the wars?
All these questions, and many others, socioanthropologist Elsa Ramos, professor at Paris Cité University, suggests asking those who have the answers. An anthropologist in my family conducts research in which your grandparents are the heroes. (Buchet Chastel, 304 pages, 22 euros), is a generous and fun book. Generous, because the researcher makes her knowledge available to everyone. It works like this: after defining anthropology as the study of human societies and what links them, it establishes a concrete guide for those who want to investigate their family.
“A thread of life”
First you must define your objective. Do we want to know more about the life of a grandfather? Share a family story? Build your origins? This helps determine who to interview. Elsa Ramos builds her book around a grandparent, but you can choose several or, if they have died, turn to one of your parents, an uncle, etc.
I had a video call with her this week and she told me this nice phrase: “My grandparents are custodians of a memory of mine that I don’t have, that of my early childhood. But they also make the link with the dead, those we did not know. They are a thread of life. » In my case, this thread would be more like my father and his brothers and sisters, or my maternal aunts. Each person chooses according to their wishes and family configuration.
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