History has always fascinated me. One's personal history, if viewed from a detached vantage point, is even more fascinating. How I took this path sometimes explains why I took this path. Either way, please don't ask Jesus.
My family history is of no less interest to me, and, arguably, has been of no significant help, except if one is seeking self awareness. Knowing one's origins is an important first step to understanding oneself.
Being fully present can be achieved through understanding oneself, one's history. Knowing one's history is just one ingredient, an essential ingredient if we wish to avoid making the same mistakes as our parents. Examining who I am and what I'm doing is more difficult. If I'm ignorant of where I'm from, and we're all somewhat ignorant of where we're from, the most natural starting point for understanding is chronological, one's beginnings.
Many layfolk believe genealogical research is to find your DAR ancestors, royalty, or other bragging rights. A few do genealogy that way. Most don't. I was fascinated to find one of my Connecticut Brainards who, according to one of the centuries old Brainard genealogy tomes, appeared to have married his daughter after losing his wife.
Dangerously inbred in Appalachia is good breeding in NY.
I began regularly visiting Dot, my mother's nonbiological mother, in middle school in the 1970s. My mom suggested I visit her. My mom also helped me apply for a newspaper delivery job. Dot lived within walking distance, and I received a paper route in her apartment complex. In high school, college, and after, I avidly listened to DoT's stories of her childhood, siblings, parents, and husbands. She was thrice widowed, which is less surprising if one marries older men and lives to 103, as she did.
In contrast, Marcia's biological mother had Asian ancestors. Marcia, as is the Asian wont, never recollected to the sliced off pieces of her flesh seated around the table at
Dot's youngest sibling, my Great Uncle Allen, lived on Armstrong Street in Rochester. At his home in the late 1990s, he handed me some handwritten papers which were, at the time, about a century old. The hand writing was from various unidentified ancestors, generations ago.
They were scribbled family trees, including barely discernible dates, names and places. He seemed pleasantly surprised at how grateful I was. I vividly recall the moment in his living room when he handed the documents to me. I accepted them with both palms up, and bowed slightly in the very Japanese way which I do more often than I realise. A WWII Veteran of the European theatre, after he was widowed, Uncle Allen moved to Georgia to live with his child, where he's buried, and his offspring breed Labradors.
An entity based in the state with The Greatest Snow on Earth provided me with some floppy disc software which I loaded onto our Sony Vaio on Clinton Street in LA. The entity later became Ancestry.com. The ancient papers are now saved to the profiles of my ancestors, available to their other descendants who have registered on the website. Last i checked, registration identity is confirmed with a credit card, although the site's basic services are free. Kinda like Facebook for the dead.
That tree, Our Tree, flourished.
The flourishing involved
The facts led me hither & yon. The accuracy of the DNA test for Mabelle's purported grandaughter, Steve Jobs's daughter, caused a kerfuffle. Just between you, me & the NSA, in the late 60s, early seventies, two guys sharing a house & drugs with a woman, none of them having a fixed bedroom, led to a situation ripe for those wishing to railroad Mr. Jobs out of his company a decade or so on.
Mr. Jobs understood that not everyone is entitled to their own facts, albeit those with money, connections, or both can define facts and obscure truth using the media. Hence his initial contention that his daughter's paternity test, which had a virtually insignificant level of fallibility, could be fallible. People aren't statistics, however, people like Mr. Jobs and I are often in the statistically least plausible percentile.
Danke Je Vel. Miss u. Luv u. >u'll ever know.
What he didn't know, none of US knew, are the powers of the Internets. Chicken scratch & tree bark scatters to the wind. Free websites, not so much. DNA tests tied to one's Internet Protocol, open for peer review, even less.
There are tools at our disposal of which I've not yet to even have an inkling. The sooner you avail yourself of the tools currently at our disposal, the sooner We can know where to focus.
