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I was in fourth grade, and it was nearly the end of the school year. I lived in Northern California in a tiny town 50 miles west of Redding, and we had no movies or movie talk. I didn’t know about Star Wars until later that summer when we moved to live with my aunt, uncle, and three boy cousins in their three-bedroom home. Nine people in a 3-bedroom house did not leave much time or money for movies, but later that summer, my mom and aunt brought all of us kids to see Star Wars.
I confess that I didn’t really get it then. Movies were hard for me because, in hindsight, I needed glasses and couldn’t really make out things on the screen very well. But I for sure pretended to love it, and in all our spelling sentences that next year my friend and I used all the names (that she taught me) of the characters (“Luke and Han wondered at the gullibility of the Stormtroopers.”). Years later, I rewatched all the movies, and now I’m a big fan, despite being a poser in 5th grade.
For my generation, when we think, “Family Tree,” we think of Vader and Luke, and Luke and Leah. A wondrous surprise family tree twist that left us all gasping in the 1980s.
Genealogy is, at its core, the study of how people are connected across time — by blood, by choice, by secret, and by loss. Strip away the lightsabers and you’ll find that Star Wars is obsessed with exactly these questions. Who are you, really? Where do you come from? Does your ancestry determine your fate? Can you escape what your family made you?
The saga keeps asking these questions because they’re the same ones that drive every person who ever sat down with an old box of family photographs and wondered about the strangers inside them.
In the end, Star Wars returns again and again to the genealogical question not because ancestry is destiny, but because understanding ancestry is freedom. Luke cannot choose his path without knowing where he came from. Leia’s effectiveness as a leader is inseparable from what both her families — biological and adoptive — made her. Rey cannot decide who she is until she knows, fully and painfully, what she came from.
This is why people research their family histories. Not to be defined by them, but to finally see clearly. Not to find out that they are special — though sometimes they are — but to locate themselves in the long human story, to know that they came from somewhere, that people before them lived and loved and suffered and survived.
The Force connects all living things. So, in its quieter way, does genealogy.
May the force be with you as you go about your MAY 4th.
Helpful Links
Events: https://www.californiaancestors.org/events-and-education/
Special Interest Groups: https://www.californiaancestors.org/special-interest-groups-for-members/
Calendar view: https://www.californiaancestors.org/cgs_calendar/
Tips & Talk: Oakland FamilySearch Center Family History Classes: https://www.familysearch.org/en/centers/oakland_california/classes
MAY
2026