The Distance Between Us & Them

Growing up, my family’s story sounded like so many other American stories.

“We’ve always been from Tennessee.”

“We’re Appalachian.”

“This is home.”

I also grew up hearing something many families in Appalachia have heard. “We’re part Cherokee.” Whether that story is true somewhere deep in my family tree or has become part of our family’s lore over generations, I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that it taught me something long before I realized it. Families don’t just inherit names. We inherit stories. Stories about where we came from. Stories about who we are. Stories that become so familiar we stop asking where they began. Those stories aren’t necessarily wrong; I just believe they’re incomplete.

A few months ago, I opened an ancestry report expecting to learn where my family came from. I’ve always been fascinated by genealogy, but I wasn’t prepared to discover how much of my family’s story had quietly disappeared or how much of it had simply changed over time.

Forty percent Scottish.

Twenty-seven percent English and Northwestern European.

Sixteen percent Irish.

Eight percent Welsh.

Six percent Germanic European.

Tiny traces of Dutch ancestry.

My first reaction wasn’t profound. It was excitement. “I knew it” because growing up, I’d always heard stories about our family being Scottish and British. Seeing those stories reflected back in percentages felt strangely validating, almost like solving a mystery I already knew the answer to. That’s all they were to me, percentages, interesting facts. Something fun to share and compare with my family. Until recently.

The longer I sat with them, the less they looked like numbers. They started looking like people. Not percentages, my ancestors, my “people” whose choices, sacrifices, and ordinary lives eventually became mine. Every percentage represented someone who fell in love. Someone who buried a parent. Someone who welcomed a child. Someone who decided to leave home. Someone whose name I’ll probably never know, but along the way they made me, me.

I clicked through migration maps stretching backward through centuries, watching lines trace across Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, Germany, and the Netherlands before eventually ending in the hills of Appalachia. Then Tennessee. Then me. The farther back I followed those lines, the less American my family looked. Somewhere between those maps and those percentages, I realized something that has been difficult to shake. I spend a lot of time thinking about immigration. I had almost never thought about the immigration that made me possible.

The frustrating thing about history is that it rarely tells us the parts we most want to know. I don’t know who in my family first decided to leave. I don’t know what they packed. I don’t know who cried first. The arguments that were inevitable. Because of course there were arguments. Maybe someone didn’t want to leave, or someone thought they were making a mistake. That’s human. I don’t know whether they looked back as the shoreline disappeared or refused to look at all. History almost never preserves those moments. It leaves us breadcrumbs like a ship manifests, church records, census pages, marriage licenses, land deeds.

Historians spend countless hours piecing together lives from whatever survives: a faded photograph, a signature on a census page, a baptismal record tucked away in a church archive. Sometimes that’s all that’s left of an entire human life. The archives can tell me where my ancestors came from. They can tell me roughly when they arrived. Knowing history is a huge puzzle piece in telling me why thousands of families left Scotland, Ireland, England, and Germany in search of something different. But none of those things can tell me what it felt like to become a stranger. Sometimes the archives tell us everything except what it felt like to be human.

History has a funny way of making extraordinary things feel ordinary.

Somewhere in my family tree were people who crossed an ocean, and somewhere else were people who packed wagons and continued west. Generation after generation, my family’s story was one of movement. Every chapter began with someone willing to leave one home in hopes of finding another. I had always thought of immigration as the beginning of someone else’s story. I never realized it was the beginning of mine. For most of my life, I treated my citizenship as though it were inevitable; as though my family had always belonged here. It never occurred to me that belonging could be inherited.

That the passport tucked inside the folder where I keep all of our important paperwork, right next to my daughters’ artwork and school pictures, even the confidence with which I answer the question, “Where are you from?” was all gifts passed down to me by people whose names I may never know. I did nothing to earn the circumstances of my birth. I didn’t cross an ocean because we all know they didn’t take a luxurious boat ride. I didn’t leave my home behind. I didn’t take on the burden and gamble everything on the hope that my children might have a better future somewhere else. My ancestors did. I simply inherited the life their decisions made possible.

Inheritance has a funny way of feeling inevitable once enough time has passed. I inherited more than my ancestors’ DNA. I inherited English. I inherited a last name no one questions. I inherited a skin color that allows me to move through this country without anyone asking where I’m “really” from. I inherited a country that feels like home because generations before me slowly became part of it. Perhaps the greatest inheritance they gave me wasn’t land. Or money (which is none, clearly), or even citizenship. It was the ability to forget they had ever been strangers. Today, it’s easy for me to look at my ancestry report and simply see “white.” History reminds me that my ancestors wouldn’t have described themselves that way. They were Scottish. Irish. English. German. Welsh.

Those identities matter. Irish immigrants faced prejudice. German Americans were viewed with suspicion during times of war. Religious differences shaped communities, politics, and a sense of belonging. Over generations, many European immigrant communities gradually became part of what America came to understand as white. Time didn’t erase those histories. It simply made them easier to forget. There is another inheritance I cannot ignore. The mountains my ancestors eventually called home were not empty. Long before my family settled in Appalachia, Cherokee families had built lives there. They raised children there; they buried loved ones there. The first ones to call those mountains home. My ancestors came looking for opportunity, and eventually, they found it. They also benefited from a nation expanding westward through the displacement of Indigenous peoples. For a long time, I thought history required me to choose between those truths.

It doesn’t. My ancestors were courageous. They also became part of a story that brought profound loss to others. History rarely asks us to choose one truth over another. It asks us to carry both. For the longest time, birthright citizenship existed in my mind as just a constitutional right never questioned it or put a lot of thought into it until recently, I learned its history. After the Civil War, the United States was forced to answer one of the most consequential questions in its history.

Who belongs?

The Supreme Court had declared in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black Americans, even those born in the United States, could never be citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment answered that injustice with extraordinary clarity. Citizenship would not depend on ancestry. It would begin with birth. The amendment was written to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children. But its promise reached generations beyond them. Including mine because I didn’t earn my citizenship. I inherited it not because my ancestors had always lived here but because they didn’t. None of this tells us exactly what modern immigration policy should be. History isn’t a policy manual. Reasonable people can disagree about borders, asylum, enforcement, visas, and national security. History cannot answer every policy question, but it does ask something of us before we answer them. It asks us to remember.

To remember that somewhere in our own family tree were people hoping another country might become home. Their circumstances were not identical to those of people arriving today. The laws were different. The world was different. I know that, but history should never flatten those differences. But the hope feels remarkably familiar. To leave. To begin again. To believe your children might inherit something you never could. That story is older than America itself.

One of the greatest gifts history has given me isn’t certainty. It’s humility because the more I learn about the people who came before me, the less convinced I become that my family’s story is unique. When I look at my ancestry report now, I don’t just see percentages. I see courage. I see uncertainty. I see sacrifice. I see hope. I see generations of ordinary people making impossible decisions without knowing how their story would end.

They couldn’t have imagined me. A woman born in Tennessee. Raising daughters in Georgia. Studying history and policy. Trying to understand how their story became mine. Somewhere along the way, migration became ancestry. The strangers that became pioneers and immigration became something my family no longer thought about at all.

Today, I looked at a screen full of percentages and remembered the beginning of the story. Perhaps that’s the greatest distance between us and them. Not oceans. Not borders. Not politics. But Memory, because before we became the people who had always been here, we were simply the people who had just arrived. History doesn’t ask me to feel guilty for what I inherited. It asks me to remember it honestly. To remember the people whose courage became my belonging. To remember the people whose loss became my opportunity. To remember that before I inherited America, someone in my family was simply hoping America might become home.