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Digging for Roots
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Roger Fritts
on September 17, 2000
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Genealogy has been a part of religion for thousands of years. For
example, in the gospel according to Matthew, the author begins to tell
the story of Jesus' life with these words:
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the
son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the
father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, . . .
The passage goes on listing fathers and sons and grandsons, with
ancient names that I have never learned to pronounce. It ends with
these words
. . . . and Jacob [was the] the father of Joseph the
husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is
called the Messiah.
This established for the gospel writer's Jewish audience that Jesus
was a direct descendant of Abraham, the founder of the Jewish faith.
In contrast to the Biblical authors, I had never been interested in the
roots of my family.
My lack of interest in family history was part of the liberal beliefs of
my parents. They believed in the premise of equality, on which our
country was founded. They believed in the melting pot metaphor,
which suggested that ethnic roots were not important. The drama
"West Side Story" was popular in our house when I was a child. It
taught us that those who clung to old world ethnic ties did not yet
understand the promise of America. Becoming an American meant
giving up our past ethnic identity.
My lack of interest in family history also stemmed from the fact that
my roots were from Germany. Given the history of the last century,
German Americans found little with which they could identify with
in a positive way. The Holocaust called up only negative, painful
associations to the word German. Today, despite a positive relationship
between the United States and Germany, American television
shows and movies still periodically characterize Germans as evil,
incompetent, or mad.
Therefore, if Americans of German heritage are asked "Who are
you?" most of us say "I am American," suggesting that our European
roots are in the past and of little consequence. In my own case as a
child, my older sister told me that we spelled our name FRITTS
instead of FRITZ because our ancestors were really from Wales and
not from Germany.
So, although I loved history, I knew almost nothing about my own
family history. When others talked of their Jewish or Italian or Irish
or Asian or African heritage, I could contribute nothing to the
conversation. As a fully modern American I had transcended old
ethnic identities. I was a free individual, with no ties to the past. In
the late 1970s when genealogy suddenly became popular because of
the book and the television drama Roots, I was not interested. I was
more focused on my future than on my past.
But then came last spring's sabbatical. At home, away from the daily
responsibilities of church, I set out to write about my own childhood
and the path that led me into a religious life. I typed Chapter 1 into
my word processor and began the task of telling about my religious
journey.
The act of writing about my childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, reminded
me of the enormous influence both my mother and my father played
in shaping who I am. Gradually I began to wonder about my
foremothers and fathers. Who were they? What had they valued?
What life adventures had shaped them? What role did religion play
in their lives?
I dug out a book I had bought during a visit I made to my mother's
hometown five years before. It had the exciting title, A History of the
First Mennonite Church in Aberdeen, Idaho. This church history
included a few words about my own grandparents, along with a small
reference to a book called The Great Trek, a 1976 doctoral
dissertation by a minister named Fred Belk.
Following this lead, I went to the reference desk of the Kensington
Public Library, the local research center for children doing school
papers and liberal ministers on sabbatical. Through the inter-library
loan service, the librarians found one copy of The Great Trek at
the College of William and Mary. When the book arrived, I could see
from the inside cover, that in twenty-four years it had only been
checked out once before, back in 1979.
Although apparently of no interest to the general public, I found
myself staying up all night devouring page after page. The Great
Trek gave a detailed account of a trip my great-great-grandmother and
four of her adult children took to central Asia from 1880 until 1884.
As a child I have a vague memory of my mother telling me that my
ancestors on her side of the family had fled Russia by crossing Turkey
on camels to come to America. As I read The Great Trek I
discovered my memory had been faulty. Great-grandfather had traveled in both
Turkestan and Kazakstan with the help of camels as well as horses.
I learned that he, his mother and his brothers and his sister had been
religious true believers. With about 600 other Mennonites living in
Russia, they had followed a farmer named Claas Epp to Central Asia.
Epp believed that the books of Daniel and Revelation predicted that
Christ would soon appear in Central Asia. My great-grandfather and
my great-great-grandmother followed Epp deep into Kazakstan and
Turkestan in search of the haven that Epp believed God had prepared
for the Mennonites to observe Christ's return. After four years of
hardship and suffering, my ancestors gave up the search and left
Central Asia for Central Kansas and later Idaho. Epp stayed in
Turkestan with a few followers and died of old age in 1913, after he
had proclaimed himself to be the son of Christ and the fourth person
in the Trinity.
I could not imagine why great-great-grandmother or four of her
children were willing to follow Claas Epp. Within a few days after
the beginning of the trip to Asia, the two infant sons of my great-great-uncle
became seriously ill and died. The travelers buried the
babies together in one coffin at a cemetery with two simple crosses
to mark their grave. I cannot imagine the pain he must have felt at this
loss. Altogether fourteen children died on the trip to Tashkent
including all the children under the age of four. To follow Claas Epp
into Asia my ancestors must have somehow lost touch with what I
know as reality. Their reason and common sense took a vacation.
The drama of this story stirred my curiosity. Longing to discover
more family history, I went back to the Kensington Library. After
talking with me, the reference librarian suggested I check out a book
called Genealogy for Dummies. The book began with the simple
suggestion that I interview my relatives. Following this advice, I sent
an e-mail to my mother's sister who lives near Chicago. In response,
she sent me a photocopy of an eleven-page family history written in
1943.
My response was a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy, to have a copy of
this document; and sadness, that no one on my mother's side of the
family had passed it on to me before.
From reading this wonderful history, I discovered that my ancestors
had lived in West Prussia until 1876 when they moved to Russia to
avoid the Prussian military draft. In West Prussia my ancestors had
lived not as poor dirt farmers, as I had thought, but as the owners of
an estate. They had their own servants in the house and hired hands
to help with the farming. The family estate was just east of the
Malbork Castle in northern Poland, the largest medieval, brick castle
in Europe. When they moved to a Mennonite settlement in Russia,
they continued to live well. However, following a religious fanatic
through central Asia can be expensive. By the time they gave up
following Claas Epp and moved to Kansas the family was nearly
broke.
I suspect that it was out of a rejection of this religious fanaticism that
my mother left the Mennonite Church and eventually became a
Unitarian. She did not reject the idea of a religious community but
she did insist on the use of reason in her religious life and she did join
a religious community.
In May, I called my brother in Annapolis and together he and I drove
down the Blue Ridge Parkway to North Carolina to visit our sister.
On the drive, and during the visit, we exchanged stories recalling
what fragments we knew of our family story.
"All this about our mother's side of the family is very interesting,"
they told me. "But what about our father's side? From where did the
Frittses come?"
When I returned to Kensington after the visit, I looked for answers.
My father was of little help. He is an only child. His father died
before he was born and his mother died when he was in his early
twenties. So to research the Fritts name I turned to the internet. There
I found a phone number for a couple named Gregory and Patricia
Fritts. They lived in Arlington, Virginia and had published a book in
1999 called the Fritts Family Heritage. I called the number and
reached Greg.
A friendly real estate agent in Arlington, Greg and his wife Pat have
been researching the genealogy of people who spell their name
FRITTS since 1973. In 1979 they published their first book on the
topic and a year ago they completed the second volume. Greg
explained to me on the phone that they had organized four Fritts
National Reunions and that several people who came told him that
they had never before been in a room with more than three or four
people with the last name Fritts before in their life. I thought about it
and realized that I had never been in a room with more than five
people whose last name ended in Fritts. Greg told me the Library of
Congress had a copy of his book.
Two days later, after filling out forms and getting my photo taken for
my reader identification card, I found myself downtown in the Library
of Congress. Because it is somewhat larger than the Kensington
Public Library, it took two hours to get the book I had requested.
Finally, however, I held Greg's and Pat's book in both hands. It took
both of my hands to hold it because it was the size of a very large
phone book. It contained more information about my father's
ancestors than I had ever dreamed was possible.
One thousand four-hundred pages, the book contained information
about six thousand of my relatives. After forty-nine years of ignorance,
I had finally traced my name. Reading about my father's
ancestors was so dramatic and exciting that I nearly broke down and
cried right there in the Library of Congress.
The next day I sent Greg a check and within a week my own copy of
the book arrived (number 360). I learned that my first ancestors in
America were Hans Ulrich Fritz and his seven-year-old son
Wooldrich Fritz who arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Elizabeth,
October 30, 1738. It is likely that they came from what is now
southwestern Germany. So the story that my older sister told me as a
child about the name of Fritts coming from Wales is not correct.
I learned that Wooldrich Fritz eventually married, had six children
and became a farmer in North Carolina, a few miles south of
Winston-Salem, where he joined the Pilgrim Reform Church.
Wooldrich served as a private in the Revolutionary Army and fought
in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781. After that battle, the
war moved on, and Wooldrich returned to his farm. On November
2, 1781, a band of Tories went to his farm and shot him dead. Today
a large monument sits over the grave of Wooldrich Fritz in the
Pilgrim Church Cemetery in Lexington, North Carolina. (So in July
I discovered that I had an ancestor buried in North Carlina, just 100
miles south of where my brother and I had gone to see my sister in
May.)
From these beginnings I could trace the history of my father's family
from 1738 to today. These were the connections I had never known
to exist: the heritage and the ties of blood that form my roots in the
world.
In late July, I visited my father in Arizona, bringing him photocopies
of what I had found regarding his family history. Most of the detail
was new to him.
During our conversation I returned to the question that had started my
quest. "Why," I asked, "did you and mom leave the churches your
parents had raised you in, (Mennonite and Southern Baptist), and join
the Unitarian Church?"
"In my case," he said, "I took a course at the University called The
Bible as Literature. I learned how the Bible was written by people
over many centuries. After that course I could never go back to the
Baptist church. About fifty years ago, after we moved to Phoenix I
went on a YMCA weekend retreat. A man I met on the retreat told me
about the Unitarian Church in Phoenix. He said that the Unitarian
Church taught that the Bible was a valuable historical document
written by people, but the Bible was not the word of God. I suggested
to your mother that we go and she agreed." My father, like my
mother, was unwilling to have his religious life split off from his
ability to use reason. He, too, wanted a church community that would
encourage him to use all of his human capacity.
I flew back from Arizona in August. Thirty thousand feet below me
was Kansas, where my mother's ancestors first settled in the 1880s.
A short time later the plane passed over Tennessee where Henry Fritts
moved after his father died in the Revolutionary War.
As the jets of the airplane carried me home, I sat next to my sleeping
children. I wondered about my quest to discover my ancestors. Why
did it all feel so important? Is genealogy just a foolish hobby?
I would argue that it is not. I think each of us is linked, in some
mysterious dance, with past generations. It helps to know about our
past because in each of our histories are stories and events that are
deeply inspiring. By knowing our history we see how the values and
ideals that our families have fought for are similar or different from
our own. Our ancestor's stories of success interconnect with our own
lives. We can learn also from the stories of the tragic mistakes, of
their dreams gone awry. We can at times even see their mistakes
repeated in our own lives.
So like the author of Matthew's Gospel, I think that the study of our
family history can be much more than just a hobby. Because each of
us is the product of our parents and grandparents as we learn more
about the people that came before us, we learn more about ourselves.
In a constantly changing world the digging for the roots is, in the end,
the quest for a stable, core identity. All modern Americans should
understand.
Rev. Roger Fritts, cluuc@his.com
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