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The email was sent by Olov Bygren. He was studying the population records of an obscure town in northern Sweden, Overkalix. What made these records unique was their detail. They recorded births and deaths over hundreds of years, but they also had accurate details of the harvests. More significantly, Overkalix's isolated location on the Arctic Circle meant that it was particularly vulnerable to famine.
In the 19th century, this was a very isolated area, they could not have help from outside. As it was so poor, they really had a hard time when there was a famine, and they really had a good, good time when the, the harvests were good.
Bygren appeared to be seeing links between generations that confounded his expectations.
I sent Marcus Pembrey an email telling him that we had some, some data, which could interest him.
I was terribly excited to get this completely out of the blue, and for the first time, it seemed that there were some data that we could then start to explore, so that was the beginning of our collaboration.
Overkalix offered Pembrey a unique opportunity to see if the events that happened in one generation could affect another decades later.
While Pembrey and Bygren sifted through their Overkalix data, someone else had stumbled on another group of people that caught them by surprise. Rachel Yehuda is a psychologist. She is interested in how people respond to stress.
Well, trans-generational effects were not on my radar screen at all until we opened up a clinic for the treatment of Holocaust survivors.
While treating the Holocaust survivors for stress, she was surprised that many of the children of the survivors were themselves suffering stress effect.
About five children of Holocaust survivors were calling us for every Holocaust survivor, and what these children said was that they were casualties of the Holocaust too that they had been affected by the Holocaust indirectly.
She was convinced that the stress in their children was caused by continual retelling of the stories by their parents.
New Words & Phrases:
confound: If someone or something confounds you, they make you feel surprised or confused, often by showing you that your opinions or expectations of them were wrong. 使混乱;使困惑;使不知所措
sift: If you sift through something such as evidence, you examine it thoroughly. 详查,细究
Holocaust: The Holocaust is used to refer to the killing by the Nazis of millions of Jews during the Second World War. 大屠杀;大破坏
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