• 57%, Yes, at least one of my parents played a musical instrument.
• 53%, Yes, at least one of my grandparents played a musical instrument.
• 30%, Yes, at least one of my great-grandparents played a musical instrument.
• 28%, Yes, at least one of my ancestors from an earlier generation played a musical instrument.
• 56%, I play (or played) a musical instrument.
• 7%, No, I don’t think any of my ancestors played a musical instrument.
• 7%, I don’t know.

Readers Respond

Dr. Bob Kenney, Narraganset, Rhode Island: My 3rd great-grandfather Lucius A. Hanks (1820-1904) was listed as a 30-year-old musician in the 1850 census for Dover, Cuyahoga County, Ohio (present-day Westlake). He played the fiddle. Lucius had been crippled due to a schoolmaster’s punishment as a boy in Pawlet, Vermont, and he walked by using loops attached to his boots to pick up his feet. Due to this disability, his employment opportunities were limited.

Ginger Gurchiek, Washington, Michigan: Four generations of my family have played musical instruments, starting with my mother (clarinet), her brother (trumpet), and her sister (piano). I played clarinet and bass clarinet, and I still play piano. My three children play drums, guitar, and piano. Three of my grandsons play saxophone, trumpet, and trombone. We have enough musicians in our family to have our own band!

Julie Gardner, Perry, Utah: My great-grandmother Jane (Simpson) Bleakley (1886-1985) lived in British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for forty-six years. Her husband, James, was a professor at the university in Colombo and Jane was a musician. She played many instruments, including piano, violin, mandolin, banjo, and Hawaiian guitar. Jane facilitated music exams in Ceylon and was in charge of an orchestra with eclectic instruments. I play one of her restored violins, an uncle has her Hawaiian guitar (which she taught him to play), a cousin plays her other violin and an incredible bowl-back mandolin, and another cousin plays her banjo. I have followed in Jane’s footsteps—I regularly play about eight instruments.

Amy Joyce, Boston, Massachusetts: In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather E.C. Ramseyer played the flute in the Newton Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts. He also played the flute at a 1904 dedication ceremony at the German Reformed Christ Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Michael Moose, Cincinnati, Ohio: My grandfather Lt. Col. William Lewis Moose, Jr., a graduate of West Point (1907), played the double-belled euphonium. When William died, the horn passed to his nephew Charles Reid Moose, who played it each year in Baltimore’s annual Tuba Christmas until shortly before his death in 2020.

Rachel Dobson, Cottondale, Alabama: My paternal grandmother came from a musical family whose members played piano and sang hymns and popular songs at family get-togethers. As an adult, Granny played guitar and mandolin. She taught my grandfather to play the C melody saxophone for a band they had in the late 1920s in the Mississippi River Delta. Granny taught high school music, gave piano and organ lessons, and was the choir accompanist at two churches every week. She influenced my father, who was a choir member and director, and a charter member of the first racially integrated community choir in Tuscaloosa in the mid-1960s.