Selah Summer: Pulling from the Roots, Lessons from Descent

In previous posts I have written about the historical significance of the True Story of the Whole World. Understanding the TSWW provides meaning for the over-arching story of history and provides meaning for all the little stories that happen along the way, including yours and mine. What’s striking about the Bible is that it contains all kinds of sordid details, messed up people and messy lives, and an ever-faithful, present, and powerful God. Across the canon genealogies are repeated to remind us that our ancestry matters, and it validates our existence. Significantly, Jesus’s genealogy traces back to Adam on his paternal side, and to God on his maternal side. I find those kinds of details so intriguing. We all come from somewhere—our heritage, ancestry, DNA helps to define who we are. The passing of my dad in September 2020 sparked the personal musings I am recording here.

My dad, Michael Lee Kelly, lived an adventurous, sometimes wild and mildly controversial 84 years, and will remain a strong and central figure in our family’s identity. His death marked the end of an era and served to close a chapter that opened in 1955 when he and my mom (who died thirty-three years ago) eloped to New Mexico—both still teenagers and scared spitless so the story goes.

So, in June, the Kelly Klan gathered to remember our roots, to acknowledge beginnings, ends, and new beginnings in the Colorado mountains. Twenty of us, ranging in age from eleven months to sixty-nine years, representing now seven distinct families, piled into a house in Granby. We were not far from the headwaters of the Colorado River, an area where our parents and grandparents taught us to fish, camp, hike, ski, and to appreciate the great outdoors. My siblings and I combed through old photos and slides and movie reels, found things like marriage certificates and social security cards, high school memorabilia and diaries, a collection of straight edge razors and brass buttons, bifocals, bagpipes, and a fishing license.

We also discovered paperwork that confirmed a notion that niggled my dad right up until his death. He was certain that his grandfather, John Kelly, was not his dad’s biological father. Yet, he had never been able to fully support this bothersome thought. In and among the boxes of stuff my dad saved, we came upon documentation that explained everything, documentation he lost track of so many years ago. The paperwork revealed that my dad’s biological grandfather died just a few years after his son, my dad’s father, was born who was then adopted when his mother remarried. So, the paternal side of our family truly does descend from an Irishman whose last name was not Kelly but Dada. Either way and for the record, the love of bagpipes and plaid, Scotch (for some), potatoes (for me), and four-leaf clovers is grounded in our history and runs deep in our DNA. One mystery solved as others emerge.

So, my Selah Summer has been rewarding, memory making, and thought-provoking. I’ve considered ways in which research and DNA serves, in many ways, to deconstruct not only theological but family narratives and adds grit and texture to the family lore, and another sentence in the true story of the whole world.

As we dug through the boxes, we measured major milestones by way of government documents: immigration to America, military service, moves and marriages, first dates and graduations, births and deaths. We searched for resemblance in the faces preserved in scalloped edged, black and white photographs, sorted through a tiny pile of possessions, pulled from the roots of our heritage, and passed things on to the next generation.

Although we can only go back a few generations in our dad’s family, it is plain to see that there was a lot of loss and grief, stops and starts, pain and joy. As I reflect on our discoveries, I am reminded that in every endeavor to deconstruct, it is important not to read too much between the lines, but to acknowledge, learn from the missteps and mistakes all along the way. The perseverance of those who have gone before lives on in the generations that follow.