The Power of Ancestor Stories

I delivered my second Toastmasters speech a couple of weeks ago. It seemed to be well received, and I was pleased. I got the Best Speaker designation but only by default because the evening’s other speaker exceeded the time limit.

My topic was family stories/family history, although I did not reveal the topic until near the end. I told five brief stories about ancestors, hoping the audience would begin to guess what the stories had in common. In addition to family-history stories I wrote about here and here, I told these:

Very early in the 19th century, a boy of 13 enrolled at Yale; however, he did not graduate because he was expelled for playing pranks. The boy was James Fenimore Cooper, who became one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, writing The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, and many other books.

Later in the 19th century, a United States senator from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner was a fierce leader of the anti-slavery movement. In 1856, he was famously and severely beaten with a cane on the floor of the United States Senate by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. The event that led to the beating was Senator Sumner’s scathing denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which allowed those states to decide whether they would allow slavery. One of the authors of the act was Andrew Butler, and Sumner’s attacker, Preston Brooks, was Butler’s nephew. Brooks addressed Sumner — who was sitting at a desk on the Senate floor — “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” As Sumner began to stand up, Brooks began beating Sumner severely on the head with a thick cane before he could reach his feet. After years of therapy, Sumner returned to the Senate. In the meantime, the beating helped escalate the tensions that led to the Civil War.

A boy born in England to a milkman father in 1951 would often assist his father with the early-morning milk-delivery rounds. The boy’s “best friend” was an old Spanish guitar with five rusty strings that had been left behind by an uncle who had emigrated to Canada. The boy’s name was Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. As he grew up, he became a musician, performing wearing a striped black and yellow sweater. Because his bandleader thought that the sweater made Gordon look like a wasp, he acquired the nickname “Sting.” Sting of course became a very famous and successful performer.

I’m distantly related to james Fenimore Cooper and Sen. Charles Sumner. Sting? I call him “Cousin Sting,” but I don’t actually know if we’re related. My point in the speech was that through studying family history, I might someday learn of a familial connection.

I knew these stories were pretty good fodder for a speech, but had I come across Mary Beth Sammons’s The Story of Our Lives blog on the Psychology Today site, I would have understood even more benefits of reveling in these family stories. Sammons has several terrific posts on the blog, including one that reports on a new study that reveals that “remembering our ancestors boosts our performance on intelligence tests and actually makes us feel better as well.” (Unfortunately her link to the study no longer seems to be good; this link may or may not have been the one she included.) The study indicates that “thinking about our ancestors reminds us that as humans who are genetically similar to us we can successfully overcome a multitude of problems and adversities.”

In another post, Sammons writes about author Frank Delaney, who “says he writes to explain his own life and to take readers on a journey to discover common, universal stories and experiences, ones told through Irish eyes. Sammons goes on: