Ancestral Landscapes: Searching for my place in the world
WORDS + IMAGES
Ancestral Landscapes: Searching for my place in the world began as a writing project called “The Ancestor Project.” It quickly evolved into a creative project that of both words and images. The words and images can each meaningfully stand alone, but each benefits from the inclusion of the other.
Ancestral Landscapes: Searching for my place in the world, is a book-length collection of 18 essays, which is looking for a publisher—ideally one that would be willing publish many of the images with it. My writing endeavor inspired, in part, by the discovery of archival photographs of great grandparents whose images were beckoning me to learn more about them. Starting with genealogical research, I found scores of ancestors who left Europe in the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries to settle in the North America continent. I chose to investigate three specific migrations across the Atlantic, each of which involved multiple ancestors--England to Virginia, the Netherlands to New York, and Germany to Iowa.
Aware that my ancestors’ settlement anywhere on this continent was connected in some way to the genocide and removal of Indigenous people who were here before they came, I sought to learn and tell the stories of the people whose land my ancestors settled—knowing that these two explorations are entwined with each other.
With land a central focus, I began to travel to the points of departure and arrival for each ancestral migration, wanting to learn what I could from these places.
As I began these travels, photographs became as central to my storytelling as the writing. My travel was spread out over a longer period of time than I had envisioned and did not follow any of the migration sequences. Initially this was frustrating, but I learned that each location informed my travel to the next one. The time between each trip allowed me to write in depth about my experiences and with more reflection, gain a better understanding of what I learned there.
I have now completed a collection of essays that describes what I learned from my study and travel to all the places of ancestral departure and arrival Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the Netherlands, Germany, Iowa, New York’s Hudson River Valley, England. I added a trip to Haywood County, North Carolina where my mother’s family settled more than a couple of centuries ago, a place I knew well from childhood, but might now see differently after my other travel. As I wrote about settler ancestors, I also reflected upon ancestors I knew, great-grandparents, grandparents, my own parents and how their lives were entwined with mine.
The work on this project was created in pieces as written and photographic essays that emerged from my travel experiences. The writing and the images informed each other, but are not necessarily text/image reflections of each other. Each visual or written piece can be meaningfully understood on its own, but the collection of pieces also fits together as a larger whole. The whole will have a meaning of its own also, though I do not believe it will necessarily be greater than the sum of its parts.
This project has led me down many paths of inquiry so there are lots of parts to my story. All the parts may not tie up into one narrative arc but I share each smaller story as it fit into my own path of self-revelation.
I have published one essay from this work and shown photographs in several exhibits, one of them a solo show. My vision for the work is both a book that collects all the writing and photographs into one or more volumes and a collection of images accompanied by text that can be exhibited. Nothing is certain about its form or ending until its publication.