by Sunny Jane Morton and Kimberly Powell, AG
Before many of us saw Lin Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary musical Hamilton, we heard it. From our child singing every word in their room upstairs. Or from a friend insisting, “No, really, you have to listen to this.” From one song in the car turning into three, then five.
Once we’re singing along, the story pulls us in. But when we stop singing and start pondering, we realize that Hamilton gives us so much to think about as genealogists. Where do we begin when retelling our own ancestral stories? Whose versions do we trust? What if no one wrote them down? How do we write about people who were brilliant, broken, ambitious, loving, selfish, brave, and deeply flawed? Or the (apparently) humdrums or unknowns?
Hamilton’s masterful storytelling helps us see that history—Alexander Hamilton’s and ours—is not just what happened. History is what survived, what was remembered, what was written down, what was destroyed, and what someone later chose to tell.
Which brings us to the first choice every storyteller has to make.
We have to decide what story we’re telling.
How could a destitute orphan from the Caribbean become a founding father of the United States? A perplexed Aaron Burr asks this question in the opening line of the show. The odds were absolutely against such an outcome for Alexander, yet this is what happened.
The opening scene—a fast-forwarded version of Alexander’s life up to his arrival in New York City as a young man—could have been an entire Act I. His father was a Scotsman in the Caribbean—how did he get there? His mother was a prostitute—how did that come about? How did they meet? His father’s abandonment, his mother’s fatal illness, Alexander’s way out through writing…all of it is worthy of storytelling.
Yet in the musical, Alexander’s childhood is compressed into one scene. That may be in part because so much less is known of his early years. But mostly, it’s because the story Lin Manuel Miranda wants to tell is about Alexander becoming a founding father—and there’s only so much room in every story.
We weren’t in the room when things happened.
At a crucial point in the story, Hamilton meets for a private dinner with his rivals, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Historical accounts conflict about what happened. As the storyteller, Lin Manuel Miranda had to choose which version of the story to portray. He chose to admit he wasn’t sure what to believe. He even embraced the mystery by having the cast sing about what each party said happened in the song “The Room Where It Happened.”
Our ancestors have little control over how they are remembered.
When General George Washington sings, “History Has Its Eyes on You,” he expresses his awareness that all the world is watching him—not just now, but future generations—and that he won’t get to choose how he is portrayed in the future. But he knows he is making history, and he warns Alexander Hamilton of the same.
Alexander’s wife Eliza is just as conscious that she is on a historical stage, and she tries to exercise some control. When she learns that Alexander not only was unfaithful to her but declared it publicly, she tears up his letters to her. She had fallen in love with him through his gift of writing, and she wants to erase the evidence of it—not just from her own life, but from the historical record. She wants to keep as much of her heartbreak from the world—including future generations—as possible.
Those who came before us were real humans, with real feelings.
When Alexander and his nemesis, Aaron Burr, both become fathers for the first time, they are caught off guard by fierce new depths of parental wonder, protectiveness, and pride. In “Dear Theodosia,” they sing to their newborn children. The men are mired in the violent birth of a new nation, yet for a few minutes they are simply fathers, looking at their children and imagining the future. They pledge to make the world better for them, as parents do, even when so much is beyond their control.
Despite Alexander’s intentions, his choices lead to the fracturing of his marriage and the death of their son. The heartbreaking song “It’s Quiet Uptown” captures the time afterward for Alexander and Eliza. Shared grief gives the estranged couple a horrible, but possible, starting place for reconciliation. “Unimaginable:” the word repeats in a hushed, sympathetic chorus. There’s no glossing over how hard this must have been.
Who tells the story changes what we hear.
The final song of Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” asks a question larger than just Alexander’s life: who gets the microphone and who doesn’t?
Who told our family’s stories before we arrived? A county historian? A newspaper editor? A courthouse clerk? A descendant with something to protect, prove, or hide? Someone with the power to be believed? Someone inside or outside the family? Sympathetic, indifferent, or hostile?
And who appears in the records only when someone else needed to count, tax, sell, sue, employ, punish, or control them?
One of the bold choices in Hamilton is that actors who do not look like the founding fathers tell their story. People of color (including women) are cast as the storytellers, and their own perspectives are included.
Who tells the story does not change what happened. But it changes how we hear the story—and what survives in the telling.
Preserving our family’s story is a choice.
At the end of Hamilton, Eliza gathers what she can. She interviews soldiers. She preserves Alexander’s writings (except those she destroyed, of course). She tells his story. And, in doing so, she leaves pieces of her own.
Most of our ancestors left us only fragments, not the reams of papers Alexander left behind. They left a signature. A mark. A tax entry. A name in a will. A silence where a letter might have been.
The stories we tell now from the fragmented past will always be imperfect. Some pieces are missing. Some are uncomfortable. Some voices are loud with power in the records—and some are absent.
Maybe that is Hamilton’s reminder for genealogists. History is not only made by the famous, the powerful, or the people who expected to be remembered. It is also made by people whose quiet lives appear in scattered remnants, waiting in the records until someone asks better questions—or looks closer at the gaps and works harder to fill them.
What will survive because we cared enough to ask—and act?