I’ve had occasion lately to do a deep, thorough scouring of my room — the type where you uncover all kinds of forgotten nooks and crannies which hold untold treasures covered by the dust of time and cat hair.

One of those treasures was found within a manila envelope in a drawer, buried underneath various papers, notebooks and the other detritus that makes up a writers’ desk.

The envelope had been mailed to my mother years ago by her sister-in-law. Hiding within was a trove of genealogical information about my mom’s side of the family, which was something that I had never really expected to find anything out about. It didn’t seem like anything that any of them really cared about — and her family was wracked by strife and disagreement for most of her life.

To wit, I was perhaps 10 or so when my mom’s brother made overtures to re-enter her life.

I only met Uncle Craig a handful of times, but genealogy was one of his chief hobbies. He had a sprawling interest in history — something that I had in common with him.

After my mom passed, we spoke a few more times — usually when he was looking for some piece of family information or other that my mom had forgotten she was in possession of (and thus had passed to me).

Uncle Craig died a few years later, and I honestly thought that all of the fruits of his labor were lost with him.

Enter, the envelope.

It contained a few miscellaneous pieces of paper, written in heavy, thick cursive. They were photocopied records about someone’s pension.

Under those were carefully-arranged genealogical family records — each of the three sheets containing a person’s name, when and where they were born, when they died, who their children were, and so forth.

I lost a few hours working through those papers — hours I really should have been pressing on with my cleaning endeavors. But combining these papers, now upwards of 25 years old, with the capabilities of today’s internet was alluring.

Through other records that I found online, I was able to trace a branch of her family tree back to 1794 — still in Pennsylvania.

I also found another relative who fought for the Union in the Civil War along the way.

It was his pension that the photocopied records were talking about. He served as a private in the 7th PA Cavalry, and apparently participated in many campaigns throughout the south, including Chickamauga as one notable name that I recognized.

He apparently served the entire war, was eventually discharged, I believe in Chicago, and returned home to find something like five of his kids had died.

I can’t even imagine.

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I have a confession to make: I grew up a fan of General Lee. I devoured carefully-manicured biographies and fell, hook, line and stinker, for the image of Lee that had been built up in the decades since the war.

That image is powerful, and seductive. As Americans, we have a culture-wide obsession with underdogs, rebels and lost causes. Lee — or at least the Lee most of us think of today — embodied all three.

I wasn’t blind to the horrors of slavery, or of the war, to be clear.

But I wanted to believe in the idea of the noble, if flawed, man who reluctantly led his troops through a conflict that he wished to have no part in.

I wanted to believe in a fantasy.

There’s still a small part of me that loves the myths of the Lost Cause — and there probably always will be.

But acknowledging that these are myths is a critical part of adulthood. They are a fairy tale; a bed-time story that served to soothe the grief of the South. And, at the same time, they maliciously served to snare millions throughout America into softening their views on the rebels, manipulating our communal memory of something that should be viewed only as unconscionable.

In this, our nation’s 250th year, we need to sit with our history, and the Civil War is an enormous part of that.

Many of the wounds of the Civil War have never fully healed and are instead covered in a thick, scabrous web of half-truths and handwaves.

This trauma casts a long shadow throughout our nation, and addressing that is no small task. We can at least begin, though, by adopting a sense of moral clarity.

Lord knows we have enough problems for our own time; we don’t exactly need to go back and dig up even more. The best way to move forward, though, is to resolve that which lies behind and stop being beset on all sides.

There is no better time for this contemplation than our semiquincentennial. Reflect, in this new time of division and anger, on what makes us American and United.

The Confederates lost, and their values — which are, definitionally, opposed to the United States — have been allowed to fester for far too long.

Let this be the year we move forward, as a country, and live up to the ideals our nation was forged upon (regardless of whether we have always lived up to them).

My ancestors fought for those values, and I intend to make them proud.

Arianna McKee is the Design and Editorial Page Editor at The Express.