familytreemagazine.com 59J
ackie Dorman knew her family’s secret
long before she understood it as such.
She was sexually abused by her step-
grandfather, George, from age 4. “I know
my mother knew about it, because I later real-
ized he abused her as well,” she said. “Nothing
was ever done about it. It was the 1950s and the
1960s, before the era when sexual abusers were
really called out for it.”
Her family never talked about it when Dor-
man was young. “My grandma was Victorian-
proper: Appearances mattered, and this kind
of thing couldn’t happen in a good family,” she
said. Only after years of counseling did she
fi nally discuss it with her siblings—one of whom
also admitted to being abused—and confront the
step-grandfather, who cut her off from her own
extended family.
When Dorman eventually began research-
ing her family history, a truism from counseling
occurred to her: Abuse tends to cycle through
generations. Following from murmurs that
something was “askew” with George’s father,
she traveled to a courthouse in New Jersey.
There, she learned he had been arrested for
gross sexual imposition of a 12-year-old. “There
it was, in black and white. The shock of fi nd-
ing that in print took my breath away,” Dorman
said. “There were four generations—at least—of
trauma and abuse: George’s father, George, my
mother, and me.”
Discovering this backstory didn’t excuse
George or make it easy for Dorman to forgive
him. But the knowledge was crucial as she
moved forward. “I hate to say it, but it was heal-
ing to fi nd that out,” she said. “It allowed me to
feel compassion as well as repulsion, like the
ends of a continuum.”
The most important eff ect was the aware-
ness that she broke down a devastating cycle.
“I’m a powerful change agent who has elimi-
nated that lineage of abuse. My children and
grandchildren, if I’m blessed to have them,
may not have to deal with it,” she said. “If they
do, it won’t be because it was passed down
from my generation.”roots and learns of their Holocaust trauma. Her
genealogical journey becomes a spiritual one as
she challenges her faith and identity and looks
diffi cult history in the eye. (^) Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remem-
brance and War, 1937–1948 by Madeleine
Albright (Harper Perennial): The former Secretary
of State refl ects on her discovery of her Jewish
family’s WWII experience and refl ects on their
experiences and secrets kept for decades.
(^) The Slaves Have Names: Ancestors of My
Home by Andi Cumbo-Floyd (CreateSpace): A
white woman researches the identities and stories
of the enslaved people who lived on her family’s
plantation and confronts the culture of silence
that had kept them hidden from history.
Learning the Backstory
(^) Family by Ian Frazier (Picador): An acclaimed
writer turns his attention to 200 years of his family’s
middle-class history, revealing their little dramas in
the larger picture of their historical context, from
the Revolutionary War to the 20th century.
(^) Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family His-
tory (Random House) and Murder in Matera: A
True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness
in Southern Italy (Dey Street) by Helene Stapinski:
A journalist traces her less-than-ennobling family
history through the criminal culture of Jersey City,
N.J., and back to the mythologized crime of her
immigrant ancestor in Italy.
(^) Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory,
and Faith by Heidi B. Neumark (Abingdon
Press): A Lutheran pastor discovers her Jewish
Tales of Discovery