Where Tyrian Thistle Is Headed From Here

What Genealogy Keeps Showing Me About Human Nature

I started this to write about family. Wills, obituaries, probate records, the Scottish and Ulster Scots lines I’ve spent years tracing back. That was the whole plan. Find the names, find the stories, put them down.

What actually happened is that the research kept doing something I didn’t ask it to do! Trace enough family lines through enough centuries and you stop seeing isolated stories. You start seeing the same fear surface generation after generation, wearing a different coat every time but never actually changing shape underneath it. In a way it feels less like history and more like watching the same wound reopen on a different body.

It’s bigger than my own family lines, and once I saw it there I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere. A food gets treated as backwards and dangerous in one generation, then comes back a generation or two later sold as a return to how things used to be, the same thing, demonized and then romanticized, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the food itself. A disease shows up and the same loop runs every time: resistance to whatever containment measures get put in place, fear aimed at whoever gets blamed first, panic over a threat nobody can see. I’ve read about corrupt leaders, bad food, and fear of the unknown going back to the Dark Ages, and it is genuinely strange to sit with a headline from this year and realize you already read this exact fear, just in older language, describing older people, centuries ago. It should feel distant. It doesn’t. It feels close enough to be uncomfortable.

I didn’t go looking for any of this. It found me, because it’s the same skill I’ve spent years building elsewhere - recognizing a pattern once you’ve learned to see it, and then not being able to unsee it anywhere else, even when some part of me wishes I could.

So that’s where this is actually headed. Still genealogy. Still history. But less “here’s what I found” and more “here’s what the finding won’t let me stop noticing”, that we keep living what feels like brand new fear, when it’s really the oldest fear there is, just wearing this century’s face. Family history stays. It’s just proof of something bigger now, and some days that proof is more haunting than comforting.