I recently had the rare opportunity to see the 1927 silent film Wings on the big screen with my friend, Deb. Watching it that way—larger than life, with the aerial battles roaring across the screen—felt surprisingly emotional. It didn’t just feel like movie history. It felt like stepping briefly into the world my own ancestors lived through during World War I.
Wings is famous for its spectacular flying sequences and for being the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Director William Wellman had been a World War I combat pilot and the films realism is incredible. But what struck me most while watching it wasn’t the filmmaking alone. It was the realization that when audiences first saw this film in the late 1920s, like Wellman, many of them had just lived through the war themselves. Some had fought in it. Some had lost children, husbands and sweethearts. For them, the story was not distant history.
That thought led me to my own family tree.
Many of us who research genealogy spend a lot of time looking at documents—draft cards, census records, military registrations, and old photographs. World War I shows up in those records in very quiet ways: a signature on a draft registration card, a unit listed on a service record, an occupation changed after the war.
My great Grandfather, Wilbur Gartman Saxon, registered for the war on the 12th of September 1918, but he was one of the lucky ones as the war officialy ended on the 11th of November that same year. I wonder if he watched this film?
Cinema, especially early cinema, can be a surprisingly powerful companion to genealogy research.
Films from the 1920s were made by people who were living much closer to the events they portrayed. Even when the stories are fictional, they often reflect the attitudes, emotions, and memories of that generation. Watching them can help us understand the cultural world our ancestors inhabited—what they saw in theaters, what stories resonated with them, what they wore, and how major events like World War I were remembered only a decade later.
Moviegoing was already a huge part of American life in the 1920s. It’s entirely possible that a young veteran in my family—or a sibling, or a sweetheart waiting back home—sat in a local theater and watched those same aerial and heart wrenching scenes nearly a century ago. Deb and I both cried when Jack returned to visit the parents of his deceased friend and we clapped vigorously at the end credits. Those emotions make the film feel less like a museum piece and more like a shared experience across generations.
Genealogy often connects us to the past through records and names. Cinema connects us through emotion and imagination. When the two meet, history becomes a little more vivid.
Watching Wings reminded me that the people in our family trees lived in a world full of stories, music, news, and films—just like we do. And sometimes, sitting in a dark theater watching a nearly hundred-year-old movie can bring us unexpectedly closer to them.
