I always thought my family, stretching back into the murk of history, had been pretty ordinary. We were dependent on farming and fishing, with maybe the odd sea captain or merchant cropping up along the way.

My ancestors were not kings or kingpins, not men and women who shaped history or left detailed accounts of their thoughts and times. They were just reasonably good people doing reasonably good things. For years, I felt glad they weren’t slaveholders or slaves. Nor were they criminals. And for every prohibitionist, there was someone hiding liquor in a cabbage patch.

Then I started digging around.

One of the hazards of genealogy, I learned, is finding unsettling things. For me, that included the discovery that a robber murdered my great-great-great-great-great grandmother on the streets of Halifax in 1781 — and went to the gallows for it. Another ancestor owned two slaves in coastal Georgia.

Yet another proved so loyal to the British during the Revolutionary War that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts said he could be killed for treason without the trouble of holding a trial.

Fortunately for me, they didn’t catch him.

There are plenty of tales of heroism and hard work, too. Taken together, this information has helped me have a better grip on who I am and how I got here.

In recent years, the Maine Philanthropy Center and Place Matters, a project within the Catherine Cutler Institute at the University of Southern Maine, have engaged on a similar dive into the past to try to “learn from the histories that have shaped how wealth and power came to be held in our communities.”

A report they jointly issued earlier this month, “The History of Philanthropic Wealth in Maine,” offers a broad outline of how some families in the state got rich through the exploitation of resources and labor — a source of much of the money that flows to charity these days.

It recommends methods of “reparative philanthropy,” which emphasizes the importance of building “authentic relationships that recognize and take accountability for harms and promote reciprocity and relationship building in acts of giving.”

Jeanette Andre, president of the Philanthropy Center, said the report offered an opportunity “to look with courage and humility at our own stories, to consider how our institutions were built, and to imagine how we might use our resources to acknowledge past injustices, invest in healing and build equitable systems rooted in shared prosperity.”

I’m encouraged that Maine’s charitable donors are among the leaders, nationally, in delving into the awkward realities of their state’s history, from the mistreatment of labor to the shipping wealth that came in part from hauling slaves to the New World.

The notion that we need to understand history if we’re going to heal the wounds of past wrongs is hard to argue with. That leaders of Maine’s nonprofit community are highlighting that tough, important work is cheering. 

The recipients of today’s charity, after all, are often the descendants of people who were left out as other families accumulated wealth.

Part of the way we create a better future for everyone is to figure out how we got to where we are today, allowing us to dive into the even more difficult question of how to make things better for tomorrow. More justice is always a good thing.