Amanda

This summer my grandpa and one of his cousins organized an Ahlgren family reunion at a beach state park in Connecticut that he and his family had always gone to when he was a kid.

My parents divorced when I was little so for a long time I didn’t really have a strong sense of family. I never experienced the big family get togethers and vacations that some of my friends told me about. Our grandparents would visit, or we would visit them, but for the most part my family was thinly spread out around the country so I would go years without seeing my uncle or my cousins, and at the same time my immediate family, while all in the same town, was divided between two houses. The reunion was the first time in at least 8 years that all of my close relatives (at least on my dad’s side of the family) would all be in one place.

Although the Saturday of the reunion was rainy and 60 degrees—not exactly the best beach weather (but I still swam!! Who am I to pass up the ocean)—still around 100 distantly related Ahlgrens showed up, all descended from one Swedish immigrant named Amanda. One after another they would introduce themselves to me as “your second cousin thrice removed Melissa!” or “your grandfather’s cousins daughter Cindy!” There was a family tree that my grandfather had worked on for countless painstaking hours, stretching 17 feet long across pushed-together picnic tables. It was family vacation on overdrive, but with 80% of the people there essentially strangers who I would most likely never see again.

In anthropology, we just read an ethnography that discussed the Micronesian concept of kinship, and described how in that culture two good friends were considered sisters (or brothers, etc.) and in that sense they were related. Familial ties were built less on blood and more on emotional connections and trust. In the same way, the people I feel closest to aren’t the ones that are technically related to me by blood, but the people that I spend the most time with and interact with the most, whether they are family members or not.  I loved going to the family reunion and finally meeting the people I had heard various stories about, and learning more about our history, but it also taught me to not focus on the relationships and connections in my life that were missing and to invest my energy into the ones I have.