The Pain That Didn't Start With You
How Trauma-Informed Genealogy Uncovers What Your
Family Left Behind
Bernadette Thompson
Trauma-Informed Genealogist, Grief and Trauma Expert, and Author of Ancestral Whispers: How My Husband’s Passing Unveiled My Spiritual Inheritance
Co-Founder, The Ancestral Healing Center
What Is Trauma-Informed Genealogy?
Trauma-informed genealogy is a facilitated method of researching family history, not simply to collect names and dates, but to uncover the hidden patterns, silences, and emotional legacies that shape how we live today. A trauma-informed genealogist guides the participant through a process that begins where traditional genealogy begins, with fact-finding, but reads the record differently. We are looking for what is absent as much as what is present. We are looking for a ripple beneath the surface.
Traditional genealogy asks: Who were my ancestors? When and where did they live?
Trauma-informed genealogy asks all of that, and then goes further: What happened to them? What did they carry? What did they bury? And how is that still living in me?
Rather than treating intergenerational trauma as an abstract concept, something that “runs in families” without specificity, trauma-informed genealogy seeks to connect the participant with individual ancestors and their specific stories. The goal is to make it possible for someone to move from “I carry pain I can’t explain” to “I carry my great-grandmother’s unresolved grief from displacement.” From a feeling without a name to a story with a face. That recognition, that moment of distinguishing between what belongs to your own lived experience and what you inherited from a specific ancestor, is where healing begins.
This is detective work. We are looking for a disturbance in the surface because there is something underneath it that isn’t right.
The Groundwork: How Thirteen Years of Crisis Work Trained
My Eye
I did not come to genealogy looking for a healing practice. I came to it the way most people do, looking for names, dates, and connections. But what I found in the records was something I had already spent over a decade learning to recognize in people.
Before I my deep interest in genealogy had bloomed, I spent thirteen years designing behavior plans on a mental health team in a public school system, working with children in an alternative education program. These were children from families in crisis, dysfunctional homes, foster care placements, situations shaped by addiction, abuse, poverty, and loss. My job was to be the person in the room who could read what was happening underneath the behavior everyone else was reacting to on the surface.
I also knew trauma was not in the dramatic moments but in the quiet ones. We had a child whose brother was incarcerated, whose mom was quietly dealing drugs, who cycled in and out of foster care because she couldn’t provide a safe home for him. On paper, his “problem” was behavioral. In reality, he was living inside a family system built on secrecy and survival, a pattern that almost certainly did not begin with his mother.
We had a tiny sixth grader, a boy carrying so much unprocessed trauma that when he became overwhelmed, he would fold himself into a hallway locker and refuse to come out until we called the local mental health crisis team. His nervous system so flooded that the only safety he could find was a space small enough to hold him. I taught other staff members this information to help them learn that, he was making himself small not as a discipline problem but as a trauma response.
And we had an eighth grader who, during one of our talking stick sessions, a circle where students could speak without interruption, said quietly that he was the only one in his family that his father beat. He wasn’t asking for help. He wasn’t even upset. He was just used to it, he was normalizing it. It is what happens when pain has lived in a family long enough that the person carrying it can no longer see it as something that shouldn’t be there. He had absorbed the pattern so completely that it had become invisible to him.
Thirteen years of those moments clearly defined where trauma hides. It hides in the silence. You watch for the flinch, the shutdown, the stillness that means something has been touched that the person cannot yet name. Behavior is communication, what people cannot say out loud they will show you if you know how to look. And when you understand that, you meet them where they are at.
Genealogy began as a hobby but it was not long before the underlying trauma showed itself as I researched. It was in the research of my own family that I began to make the connections. The documents, the records that were missing, or incomplete or telling a story that didn’t make sense. Finding my grandmother and her siblings listed as inmates in a facility and realizing they were orphans. A story that was never shared. It was the tip of the iceberg.
What the Records Revealed: My Own Family’s Inherited Pain
It was in the research of my own family that the connections between genealogy and trauma became impossible to ignore. I wasn’t looking for trauma. I was looking for stories, for names, for a sense of where I came from. But when you research with a trained eye, the trauma finds you.
My paternal grandmother Helen and my grandfather Edmund had both passed away from tuberculosis by the time my father was six years old. He and his brother were raised by two loving great-aunts and their husbands. That was the story I knew. What I didn’t know was what had happened a generation earlier.
As I researched my grandmother’s family, I discovered that she and her four sisters had been taken from their mother after their father died of pneumonia in a tenement in New York City. The oldest was ten. The youngest was a year old. My grandmother was two. They were placed in orphanages through Catholic Services, and a census record from 1905 showed they had been there since 1900. My grandmother was in that orphanage for over twelve years. That story was never shared with us.
Going further back, I found the passenger record of my great-great-grandfather, Patrick Sinnott, arriving in 1849 with his father and brothers on the famine ship Erin go Bragh. They were on the list of Famine Immigrants at the Port of New York. My ancestors were Irish famine families, people who had been evicted from homes they were never allowed to own, they watched their crops fail while landlords exported food, who boarded ships out of desperation not knowing if they would survive the crossing.
I began to see patterns in my own family that I had never questioned because they were just how things were. The scarcity. The voice that said don’t ask for anything, you don’t need that, don’t take too much, others need it more. The emotional reactions I still have to spending money, even on necessities. Those responses didn’t begin with me. They didn’t begin with my parents. They began with ancestors who had literally starved, who had lost everything, who had learned that survival meant needing less.
I also began to look at my father through the lens of what I knew about trauma. When his great-aunts lost their sister Helen to tuberculosis, they made a decision that was common for the time, they put all the photographs and remembrances of his parents up in the attic, away from where he and his brother might see them. They believed that keeping their memory alive would do more harm than good. My father was six. He had real memories of his mother. He missed her terribly and never stopped telling us so.
When his aunts passed away decades later, my great-uncle brought a box down from the attic. It was filled with pictures of my grandparents, pictures my father had never seen. His grief came rushing back as if the loss had just happened. He was in his fifties, and he was a little boy again, missing his mother.
I was watching intergenerational trauma in action. The well-meaning decision to hide those photographs was itself a trauma response,
an attempt to protect two little boys by burying
the pain. And what it actually did was bury the story alongside it.
When the box came down from the attic, fifty years of unresolved loss came down with it.
This work I was doing for other families began to change. Genealogy was the place where I could see, in the records and the silences, the same patterns I had spent thirteen years recognizing in the children I worked with. The family systems built on secrecy. Pain carried so long it became invisible. The behaviors that looked like choices but were actually responses to something that happened generations ago.
My great-aunt had left diaries. So I didn’t just know my ancestors by name, I had a record of their daily lives, their struggles, their small triumphs. As I read them, I could feel their presence. The stories of what they survived, the famine, the crossing, the orphanage, the tuberculosis, these were historical facts that were a part of my life. This view of their lives showed deeply what a life filled with trauma looked like. Personally they were the source of the strength I was drawing on as I navigated the hardest years of my own life.
I didn’t set out to build a healing practice from this work. But as I researched other families’ trees, it became clear that records tell you more than names and dates if you know how to read them. The lived experience of watching my own family’s inherited patterns come into focus was the backdrop of understanding this is work that needs to be done. Ancestral trauma, intergenerational trauma is in all families and trauma-informed genealogy is a path to begin the healing.
What Genealogy Reveals That Therapy Alone Doesn’t
When someone comes to me for genealogical research, they usually come with a question. Sometimes it’s simple, they want to know where their family came from. Sometimes it’s more complicated, there’s a gap in the family story, a name no one will explain, a feeling that something has been left out. And sometimes they don’t have a question at all. They just know something doesn’t sit right.
What happens next is where trauma-informed genealogy differs from traditional research. I am not just looking for records. I am reading the records through the lens of someone who has spent decades recognizing trauma, in children, in families, and in my own lineage. I am also watching the person in front of me. When their voice drops at a certain name, when they skip over a generation as if it doesn’t exist, when they tell me a family story and their body says something different than their words, that is data. It is as important as anything I will find in a census record or a ship manifest.
A woman in her seventies came to me wanting to know more about her family. She had grown up in a middle-American Christian household. Her father had attended a private Christian high school and Harvard. He became an academic and headmaster at a private school in upstate New York. She also shared something that had stayed with her for decades, her father and her grandfather had a strained relationship, and she had never understood why. Both had passed away years ago, but she still carried that unresolved question.
As I looked at her ancestral tree, I was drawn to something that didn’t match up. It didn’t make sense at first. Then I found it, her grandfather had changed the family name. She had never mentioned this. She didn’t know. When I gently shared with her that her family name had been changed and that she was of Jewish ancestry, everything in the room shifted.
She became deeply emotional. Not only because she hadn’t known, but because she had always felt an affinity for the Jewish people, and now she understood why. A feeling she had carried her whole life without explanation suddenly had a source, not in her own experience, but in her grandfather’s decision to conceal who they were.
That discovery also unlocked the question she had come in with. The strained relationship between her father and grandfather, she would never know exactly how much her father knew or didn’t know. But she understood that the name change most likely came so the family could escape the prejudice of the times and have the best chance for a safe and prosperous life. What had looked like family tension was actually the weight of a secret that shaped everything, identity, opportunity, belonging, and the distance between a father and son who may have been carrying different versions of the truth.
The healing began immediately. Not because I diagnosed anything or prescribed a treatment, but because a feeling that had no name for seventy years was traced to a specific ancestor and a specific decision. That is what trauma-informed genealogy does. It gives the pain a face.
Another client had lived an adventurous life by any measure. She was a marathoner, an educator and school counselor, a woman who had travelled the world, walked the El Camino de Santiago alone, and taken a sabbatical to live with a family in Spain. She personified strength and independence. She was someone I admired. But when we talked, she was at a crossroads. She had taken that sabbatical because of a difficult life challenge. She needed to heal and rediscover who she was.
We began looking into her ancestral lineage, not for answers, but out of curiosity, which is how many people get started. She had collected stories on both sides of her family, but one woman’s story began to stand out. Her name was Jerusha Gurnsey, born a pioneer in Vermont in 1799.
Jerusha and her husband set out in 1834 to move west with eleven children. Their dream was to reach California. They followed the trail of others who had left Vermont, eventually joining the path of the Mormon pioneers. They made it to Nebraska, where tragedy struck, her husband and youngest child both died.
Jerusha did not stop. Determined to follow her husband’s wishes, she joined a wagon train continuing to Iowa, then to Utah, and eventually onward to San Bernardino, California, where she is now remembered as one of the original pioneers.
When my client heard this story in full, she recognized something in Jerusha that she recognized in herself. The drive to keep moving forward when everything has fallen apart. The refusal to stop. She had always wondered where that part of herself came from, the part that walked across Spain alone, that ran ten marathons, that started over when life demanded it. Now she knew. It wasn’t just personality. It was inheritance.
She didn’t just learn about Jerusha. She felt her. That connection, the moment when a client moves from knowing about an ancestor to feeling them, is the moment the healing deepens. It is no longer an abstract idea that strength runs in families. It is specific. It has a name, a story, and a face.
A client came to me already knowing that her family tree would hold difficult truths. She was from the South, and the first thing she said to me was, “I’m from the South... you’re going to find stuff.”
We did. Her family had a colorful past on both sides. Her mother came from a wealthy family, ancestors who were Civil War officers with large farms and enslaved people. Her father’s side was not as wealthy, but as I researched further back, the records told a story no one in the family had spoken aloud.
Her great-great-grandmother owned a small farm and had five children. She had one slave. On the records, no father was listed for the children. They were listed as mulatto. Her great-great-grandfather, the father of those five children, was the enslaved man on that farm.
This is what trauma-informed genealogy looks like when the records are speaking in the language of their time. A census taker in the 1800s wasn’t going to write down what was actually happening in that household. But the evidence is there if you know how to read it. No father listed. Children documented as mulatto on a farm with one enslaved person. The record doesn’t say it directly, but it says everything.
For my client, this discovery carried a weight that was different from anything else we had found. This wasn’t just a family secret. It was the collision of power, race, ownership, and silence, all compressed into a few lines on a census record. Her ancestors were on both sides of that history. The enslavers and the enslaved were in the same tree. And the children born from that were listed in language that erased the truth of who their father was while documenting it at the same time.
What made this moment important was not just the discovery. It was what it explained. There were patterns in her family, things not talked about, lines not crossed, a weight that sat underneath the family’s story of itself. That weight didn’t start with her. It didn’t start with her parents. It started in a household where the truth was too dangerous to name, and the silence that protected it was passed down as if it were just how the family was.
Not every discovery is this stark. Many families carry quieter traumas, loss that was never grieved, abandonment that was never acknowledged, abuse or neglect that was never spoken of, moves that were never explained, relationships that went cold without anyone understanding why. But in every family, there are silences that shaped what came next. Trauma-informed genealogy is the practice of reading those silences and tracing them back to where they began.
These stories illustrate something that no other modality offers in quite this way. Therapy can help someone process what they feel. Genealogy can document what happened in the past. Trauma-informed genealogy connects the two, it takes the unnamed feeling and traces it backward through the family line until it reaches the ancestor whose experience created it. The client who carried an unexplained affinity for the Jewish people for seventy years did not need more therapy to process that feeling. She needed a genealogist who could find the name change in the records and understand what it meant. The woman who walked the El Camino alone did not need someone to tell her she was resilient. She needed to meet Jerusha.
When a client can move from “I carry something I can’t explain” to
“I carry my grandfather’s secret” or “I carry Jerusha’s strength,” the work has
a specificity and a power that changes everything.
The pain, or the resilience, is no longer floating. It belongs to someone. And once it belongs to someone, the client can begin to see what is theirs and what was inherited. That distinction is where healing begins.
The Strength in the Tree
When I research a family’s history, I don’t only find trauma. I find what people survived. And those are not the same thing.
The trauma is what happened, the famine, the displacement, the loss, the secrets kept to protect a family’s place in the world. The strength is what they did next. My grandmother spent twelve years in an orphanage and came out the other side and built a family. Patrick Sinnott boarded a famine ship with his father and brothers not knowing what waited on the other side of the ocean, and they made a life. Jerusha Gurnsey lost her husband and her youngest child in Nebraska and kept going west with the rest of her children until she reached California.
We are here because they were resilient. Every person reading this exists because somewhere in their lineage, someone faced something that should have ended the line, and didn’t let it. That resilience is as much a part of our inheritance as the trauma. It travels the same path, through the same family systems, carried in the same silence.
And that is exactly the problem. Resilience is why the story was never told.
When our ancestors survived something devastating, the response was to close the door on it. It was done. It was in the past. Time to move on. They didn’t sit with it. They didn’t process it. They didn’t tell the next generation what they had been through, because the whole point of surviving was to leave it behind. The determination to keep going, the very strength that kept the family alive, is the same force that sealed the story shut.
This is why so many families don’t know their own history. It isn’t because no one cared enough to pass it down. It is because the people who lived through it cared so much about moving forward that looking back felt like a threat to everything they had fought for. The silence wasn’t neglect. It was the final act of resilience, and it cost the generations that followed the knowledge of where their own strength came from.
I was resilient through my husband David’s battle with alcoholism and his passing, before I ever knew my ancestors’ stories. I drew on something I couldn’t name at the time, a capacity to endure, to keep going, to hold a family together when everything was falling apart. It was only later, when I found the famine records, the orphanage documents, the diaries, that I understood. That strength didn’t begin with me. It had been traveling through my family for generations. I just didn’t know where it came from because the people who gave it to me had closed the door on the story behind it.
When a client discovers an ancestor who survived something extraordinary, the first response is almost always grief for what that person went through. But the second response, the one that changes things, is recognition. They see their own endurance reflected back at them from a hundred years away. They stop seeing their strength as something they had to manufacture alone and begin to see it as something they received. The same ancestor who passed down the fear of scarcity also passed down the ability to survive with almost nothing. The same family system that buried a secret also protected its children fiercely enough that they are still here, generations later, sitting across from me and asking questions.
I am not building a record of suffering when I build a family tree. I am building the backdrop for a story that includes all of it, the hardship and the endurance, the silence and the survival. And when a client can see both, they stop seeing themselves as the end point of a line of damage. They begin to see themselves as the latest in a line of people who made it through.
An Invitation
You may have always sensed that something in your story didn’t start with you. You may have felt it in the way your family handles money, or grief, or conflict. In the stories that get told at every gathering and the ones that never do. In the branch of the family tree that everyone knows not to ask about. You may not have had the language for it, but the feeling has been there.
Trauma-informed genealogy is not about exposing what your family buried. It is about understanding why they buried it, who they were protecting, and what it cost the generations that followed not to know. It is also about finding what they gave you alongside the pain, the resilience, the endurance, the stubborn refusal to let the line end, and claiming that as part of your story too.
This is work I do every day with individuals and families through the Ancestral Healing Center. It is also the work I wrote about in my book, Ancestral Whispers: How My Husband’s Passing Unveiled My Spiritual Inheritance, where my own journey through grief and loss opened the door to the ancestral connections that changed the course of my life.
If you are curious, that is enough. You don’t need to know what you’re looking for before you start. The ancestors have been waiting.
About the Author
Bernadette Thompson is a grief and trauma expert, trauma-informed genealogist, and author of Ancestral Whispers: How My Husband’s Passing Unveiled My Spiritual Inheritance. She is the co-founder of the Ancestral Healing Center, where she specializes in helping individuals and families uncover the hidden patterns, silences, and emotional legacies carried across generations, and in distinguishing between pain that belongs to a person’s own lived experience and pain inherited from specific ancestors.
Bernadette holds a BA in Psychology from Merrimack College. She spent thirteen years on a mental health team in a public school system, working with students in an alternative education program, children from dysfunctional families and foster care whose lives had been shaped by abuse, neglect, addiction, and loss. That work, providing crisis intervention and trauma-informed support to young people in some of their hardest moments, became the foundation for everything that followed. She is a Certified Grief and Trauma Specialist and a certified End-of-Life Doula through the University of Vermont.
Her work has been shaped by more than twenty years of professional experience in grief and trauma, her personal journey through the loss of her husband to alcoholism, and the ancestral discoveries that revealed generations of inherited resilience in her own Irish-American lineage.
She is a featured speaker at the Los Angeles Tribune Leadership Summit, the Global Women’s Journal Leadership Summit, and the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2024 and 2025 conferences
Bernadette lives in Los Angeles, where she continues to work with clients, develop curriculum for the Ancestral Healing Center alongside co-founders Ruschelle Khanna, LCSW and Michael H. Hallett, and build the emerging field of trauma-informed genealogy.
The Ancestral Healing Center: https://www.ancestralhealingcenter.com/
Tell Me Our Story, Ancestral Healing: https://www.tellmeourstory.com/