Know Where You Came From

This episode is about ancestry, identity, and the stories that formed you before you were old enough to name what they were giving you.

This episode pairs with the opening reading: In the Beginning.

Scott's Chapter Zero

My great-grandfather's father immigrated to the United States from Australia in the late 1800s. His father had migrated to Australia from England in an era when many in England associated Australia with criminals. What I do know is this: his descendants were tough men.

During the Great Depression, my great-grandfather Charles Sparrow was not selling. He was buying. In the 1940s, my grandfather Raymond Sparrow was drafted into the Army, wounded while guarding prisoners of war in France, and later spent the war welding ships after Army leaders discovered he could weld. I never asked him much about that time. What I share here, I know only from the little my dad told me after Grandpa passed away.

I pause here from storytelling to impart some of the little wisdom I have. The second "to do" in this book — the first being to look for the extraordinary in the ordinary and tell your own story — is this: find out who you are and where you came from.

Knowing who you are establishes a starting point. It provides a lens through which to look into the future and decide where you want to be. I would add this: it begins with understanding where you are. And where you are begins with knowing where you came from. Your personal backstory — even your setbacks — becomes part of the setup for who you can become.

In our family, that lesson lives inside the legend of Chub and Jack: the team of horses that pulled through a snow slide together, and later kept working even after Jack came out of a collapsed canal tunnel nearly blind. Chub guided him. Jack kept pulling. Hard work, trust, loyalty, teamwork, and inherited stories like that can shape who we become if we let them.

The invitation is not to become impressed with my family lore. The invitation is to find out where you came from, who you are, and where you are going.

Charlie's Response

Michael Jr. talks about life the way a comedian talks about a set: the setup comes first, then the punchline. He argues that our gifts, our backstory, and even our setbacks all become part of what we are eventually able to offer. I think that's one reason Homer's advice to find out who you are and where you came from is so strong. You cannot do much with your setup if you refuse to look at it.

Once when I asked my brother about the expert marksmanship badge on his uniform, he admitted he kept qualifying even though his eyesight was poor enough that far targets were hard for him to see. He compensated by getting very good up close and by depending on people around him to watch what he could not. Family stories can work like that. They give us borrowed sight. They help us see courage, humor, grit, tenderness, and endurance before we know how to name those traits in ourselves.

When our Grandpa William "Tony" Francis thought a kamikaze pilot might hit his ship, he told himself, "Well Francis, it looks like you're going to have to swim tonight." That kind of optimism becomes part of the inheritance. You carry it because someone before you carried it first.

The research on family story backs this up. The "Do You Know?" scale and the studies it inspired consistently connect family-story knowledge with higher self-esteem, a stronger internal locus of control, and lower anxiety. One study of university students taking a family history class reported an 8% improvement in self-esteem and a 20% reduction in anxiety.

So tell the heroic, heartfelt, ridiculous, funny, and even apocryphal stories that helped make you. Ask other people for theirs too. Watch what happens when people remember they come from somewhere.

And for those whose family stories come with more pain than comfort: this invitation still belongs to you. The work is not pretending everything was good. The work is telling the truth about what formed you and finding a way to carry that truth toward strength and peace.