The Never Ending Question

Genealogy or the Never Ending Questions

I suppose everyone goes through it. You reach an age at which you suddenly come to the realization that there is more life behind you than ahead of you. Then, it becomes terribly important to connect with those ancestors with whom you share an increasingly palpable commonality.

This is the point at which you decide that it is time to examine all of that history. Researched, compiled, edited, explored, reconstructed, revealed, and codified for future generations. You begin tentatively. The old Family Bible with its cryptic birth and death entries is generally the initial resource. Somehow though, it generates more questions than answers.

What ever became of this person or that one? Isn’t HE the son that went to California before the First World War? Didn’t he study architecture or engineering or something like that? Went to John’s Hopkins, is what I heard grandmother say once…I think.

Resources include old photographs, yellowed and brittle, more cryptic notations, dates, names (but no particular positional references; just the names, sort of in a MATRIX of names), places (isn’t that the old home place down in the country? I seem to recall that tree from the summers I spent at that house), things, faces to which your own countenance bears a faint similarity in appearance. Other resources are letters, certificates of birth and death, service records from different branches of the military, medical records, newspaper articles, books written by or about someone either in the ancestral tree or associated with a member of the ancestral tree in some way.

All of these provide leaf and fruit for the family tree you’ve begun to nurture to maturity. If your family contemporaries are even remotely similar to mine, you’ll find interesting and amazing connections to people whom yesterday you didn’t even know existed.

It’s an adventure into self-awareness and realization that can’t be perceived, it must be experienced. Thinking about who you are in the absence of a knowledge of who you came from and how you fit into the overall panoply of history is an exercise in delusion. You must get immersed in the study of your origins, eventually. Don’t wait too long. You’ll want to have time to revel in the discoveries you are destined to make once you embark on this journey.

Most of all, enjoy the trip. Each step is enlightening, some may prove to be disturbing, but in the vast overall view of families in the family of man, yours may be the most delightful among many.