Genealogy is definitely vertical. I want to identify with my ancestors. I acknowledge that their lives and decisions shaped our very beings. It was our parents/grandparents/great grandparents fecundity that literally give us life. Why were they located in a particular place? Who did they marrry?
But for most of my life, I've defined myself horizontally. I am not like my parents. They are different from me. I do my own thing. etc etc
Really?
Many profound things happen when your parents die. Most of them full of sorrow and absence.
But it does give you a chance to look at their lives critically, something you can't do when they are with you. For one thing, they likely to have something to say themselves about their own lives and you, child, don't know what you are talking about.
Yes, yes, been there.
I see now that they truly lived horizontally. They broke from their parents and hometown to truly do something new. They were very committed to the postwar paradise model. My yioung ivy league educated Jewish engineer father with his cute slim Jewish wife seized the day to go to California where the sun shone, They left their extended families in New England and went west. Where job opportunities abounded for the male wage-earner family. Everything was new and shiny. They could raise their children in the new suburbs on the winding streets with the spanish names. Those children could escape the worn tired prejudices back east. A new beginning for everybody.
Not truly so different from their ancestors (neither were second generation American) who came across the Atlantic for a similar new life.
They had a car like this and they moved to new towns in Southern California that looked like this. Minus the flying saucer.
Picture by Fred Hill, a southern California artist from his website. Used without permission. This picture truly was what I was looking for. How it looked then to those young people streaming across the country to buy new homes in the orange groves.
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