Many people seem to be drawn to their ancestors. Sometimes it’s a cultural thing, other times it’s simply a curiosity, but to some it is deeper than that. To some there is an inner drive to know their roots, know where they came from, and connect with those who brought them to this world.
Kurt Cobain seems to be one of those in the latter group.
I was in 7th grade when the Nirvana craze hit the world. One of my best friends at the time had been living in Ireland for about 8 months before 7th grade began. I remember I went to the airport to welcome him back. When he walked off the plane after that 12 hour flight he was wearing a Nirvana t-shirt. I asked him, “What’s Nirvana”. He was shocked I didn’t know who they were. “They’re only the biggest band in the world”, he told me. I assumed it was just some Irish thing he was blowing out of proportion. A few weeks later when school started, I quickly learned I obviously missed the memo. I quickly tracked down a flannel shirt in my garage and assimilated into grunge conformity, as ironic as that sounds.
Kurt Cobain was the idol of the day back then, the king of the Seattle sound. On the surface, most people who didn’t know much about him would have imagined that he wouldn’t have cared about knowing his ancestry. Contrary to the truth, most people probably believed he didn’t care about anything. He had a very rough exterior and an angry interior. A hermit like creative genius who was thrust into the biggest spotlight in the world at a very young age, it was a recipe ripe for tragedy. Only a couple years after becoming one of the best known musicians in the world he killed himself with a shotgun alone in his mansion.
Despite the image most of society passively had for him, he was a very thoughtful and introspective person. Part of his caring introspective character involved a desire to know more about his family history. In the early 1990’s doing family history research was much more complicated than it is today. We now have the internet and tools such as Ancestry.com, but back then we had microfiche and long distance phone calls to genealogical societies and such.
Because of this Kurt Cobain created his own unique form of family history research. A few years ago my friend Rob told me about this method he used. You can watch this short video to hear about it from Kurt’s own mouth.
Cobain is a unique name. I think this was a very creative way to try to find family connections. I love that in the middle of becoming the biggest star in the world he was thinking about his ancestors and was looking for his connection to the past. It turns out that his San Francisco connection was wrong about his ancestry. In 2010 his true ancestry was discovered by a distant relative. There is more of that story here:
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/kurt-cobain-irish-roots
Learning about his desire to know his roots and his efforts to learn more make me wish he was still here today where the tools to help him know his ancestry are simple and powerful. I looked it up and ancestry.com has thousands of his family connections cataloged.
https://www.ancestry.com/search/categories/42/?name=Kurt_Cobain
I wonder how having access to all this information about his roots would have affected him…
