Is romanticizing the past holding back the future?

When you attend a gathering of relatives who share the same grandparents, you are "Tom's son" or "Elsie's girl." At a more widespread family reunion, with everyone hearkening back to François Girouard who lived 300 years ago, your identity is more general. You may be one of the Louisiana Girroirs, or a New Brunswick Gerrior. When the gathering becomes community-wide, such as Lunenburg's grand reunion in 2003, you become slotted as "Corkum" perhaps, or "Rudolph." Your identification has grown from the personal through the general to the generic.

Look at this another way. You live in Halifax but are visiting Fredericton. Someone asks where you are from. You won't give your street address because you know that isn't necessary. But the person you're talking to says, "I went to university there and know it well. Where in Halifax do you live?" So you specify the south end or Armdale.

When you were a child perhaps you did something that my wife and I both did. You'd write your name down and then work outwards-street address, neighbourhood, community, county, province, region, country, continent, hemisphere, planet. What we all do, automatically, is adapt our geographical descriptor to the circumstances in which we are asked for it.

This is what our ancestors did, and the practice gives genealogists headaches, if not the vapours. In 1871 great-grandfather told the census taker he came from Ireland, Scotland or Germany. That remained the written record unless someone had a reason to fine-tune the geographical location.

I thought of this as I read Margaret Conrad's article "Historical Consciousness, Regional Identity and Public Policy." The Acadia University professor asks what part have various things-textbooks, the media, historic sites, community celebrations, tourist promotion, family gatherings-played in creating a sense of identity among groups and individuals in Atlantic Canada, and what impact the identities have on what we think is socially desirable and politically possible.

I suppose we could take a step back and ask, "What is an Atlantic Canadian?" How many of us who live here think of ourselves as Atlantic Canadians?

You can argue that if you live within the area comprised of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador you are, ipso facto, an Atlantic Canadian. You can find us on a map. Dr. Conrad goes a step further and defines regionalism as "a political stance, a consciousness of a shared outlook that can be summoned up when other structures-familial, communal, provincial, national, and global-fail."

We are the product of our individual pasts, which is what genealogists trace, and we are likewise the outcome of a collective history. Still, we need to treat many of our cherished identities more as comfortable myths rather than as history. Was Scotland always bonny? Was Ireland ever greener than elsewhere? Were all Loyalists really loyal?, In Atlantic Canada we possess lifestyles, plural. We are not a monolith, but a collection of diversities. Those differences reflect a variety of ethnic, religious, geographical and socio-economic identities. It is in weaving a commonality out of those fascinating strands that we become Atlantic Canadians, and not merely transplanted Highlanders in Cape Breton, marginalized Acadians or Mi'Kmaq, Loyalists or Planters.

On the streets of Hong Kong will it matter that Finbarr O'Houlihan comes from Avalon, NL, or Fabien Simard from Edmundston, NB? They will be two Canadians in a sea of people who are not Canadians. Had Finbarr been from Vancouver and Fabien from Montréal, in Hong Kong they would still be "two Canadians." We need to take ourselves beyond our parish pumps, rethinking-and discovering-ourselves in broader contexts than we have in the past.

We go the direction we look. If we start to think more widely of ourselves as Atlantic Canadians, perhaps it will be a step toward thinking beyond our inherited limitations-in itself a liberating experience.

Canada began with talk of a union of these four provinces. Now there's talk of Atlantica, an economic bloc that would marry Atlantic Canada to Québec and New England. Whether you like it or dread it, it's a good idea to examine it for what may be useful. Treat it like a book of house plans: You don't have to build a mansion, but there may be valuable tips to enrich the home you already have.

Dr. Terrence M. Punch is the resident genealogist on CBC radio and editor of Genealogist's Handbook for Atlantic Canada Research.