Ancestry Magazine

What force of nature makes us shun attainable goals and propels us toward the single family line that just seems so impossible?

Most people have black sheep in their family trees. I have a black hole.

Here’s the story:

One day, my father’s father disappeared. My grandma was worried; she received no relief when, a day later, a doctor from the mental institution called and said my grandfather had been admitted there. When she went to visit, the doctor told her there was no chance my grandfather would ever be released and that she should probably move on with her life. She was only 22 and she was scared, so that’s exactly what she did. She got a divorce, moved on, and married the man I would grow up knowing as my grandfather. Soon after she married, my blood-grandfather was released.

I met my real grandfather a few times before he died in 1995, but to be honest, he was pretty messed up: a bipolar alcoholic who couldn’t rise above the pull of his circumstances. On the other hand, my father and my adopted grandfather never really got along. The result is that I look at my blood-grandfather and at the little I know of his ancestry, and I cannot look away. His family came from Russia, but no one seems to know his father’s Russian name. There are other names and dates, but they all lead into the darkness.

The ironic thing is that on every other branch of my family tree, there are plenty of answers, plenty of opportunities to gain momentum, and yet I cannot look away from my father’s father. He is a black hole, sucking me past the event horizon of his life and into the singularity of his—of my—mysterious existence.

Gravitational Pull

Black holes are areas of space with such titanic gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape once trapped.

For millennia people have worked to explain this inevitable attraction. And, despite my acceptance of concepts including curvatures in space, general relativity, and quantum mechanics (I said accept—not understand), there is still something about gravity that I find undeniably mysterious. Not necessarily scientifically mysterious, though there are still some hefty questions there, but it is something we can’t avoid, like death and taxes (if you’ll pardon the tired cliché), and so we don’t question it.

Perhaps it is gravity’s obvious manifestation: things falling. Even thousands of years ago, people couldn’t ignore the fact that things fell toward earth. In the seventh century, Indian astronomer Brahmagupta described earth’s attractive qualities very poetically: “All heavy things fall down to the earth by a law of nature, for it is the nature of the earth to attract and to keep things, as it is the nature of water to flow, that of fire to burn, and that of wind to set in motion.”

Is it my nature to fall toward my grandfather? I wonder.

Even with poetry—and simple observation—the road to understanding gravity became riddled with dead ends. It’s amazing how so many people can see the same effect and come up with so many different explanations for it.

Of course, the mainstream understanding of gravity followed a well-documented path: Galileo rolling balls down a hill and realizing that if it weren’t for air resistance, everything would fall at the same speed; Newton supposedly watching the apple fall and his understanding of massive objects in space; Einstein arguing that some objects curve space and other objects simply move along that curvature.

But there’s more to the story of gravity than the mainstream theory. For Aristotle, things wanted to stay within their appropriate sphere. Arab philosophers thought it had to do with weight. In the 1700s, a physicist named George-Louis le Sage championed the theory that gravity was caused by tiny particles (which he called “ultra-mundane corpuscles”) that flew through space, causing objects to be attracted to each other. Theories today try to deal with discrepancies in Einstein’s theory (mainly the problem that it doesn’t work on super-small objects), superstring theory, process physics, and so on. But even so, there are still mysteries.

So what does all this have to do with black holes? Like I said before, black holes are essentially sea monsters of gravity: they reach out with their colorless tentacles and pull you in. But, more importantly, what does this have to do with my grandfather?

A Single Line

For me, my grandfather is a black hole, and I’ve been caught in his gravitational field. I cannot seem to escape. Do I have other ancestors? Sure. Would researching them yield amazing and fulfilling results? Probably. Can I focus my attention on them? Nope.

Try as I may, I cannot escape the attraction of my grandfather who isn’t my grandfather but is … you understand what I mean. It could be that the pathos of the circumstances of his divorce have such weight that I cannot help but fall toward it. Maybe he is warping spacetime. Is the mysterious Russian blood he gave me somehow the crystalline sphere to which I am naturally attracted?

Bodies in history are like bodies in space: they have mass, and more importantly, they have attraction. They pull at us, imperceptibly at times, but they pull nonetheless. And like gravity, no one really knows for sure what that attraction is. There are a lot of theories, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but in the end, the cause of the gravity between us and our ancestors is as nebulous as the cause of gravity in space. The only thing we can be sure of is that it’s there.

Ian Pope is a freelance writer and occasional genealogist who is genuinely interested in what you think of this article. Reach him at mister.ian.pope@gmail.com.