Travelling back the road

TNC has a great post about his discovering of his genealogy and the thoughts it provokes.

Last summer, when I was unemployed and had lots of time on my hands (as opposed to now, in which I am poor, semi-unemployed, and have lots of time on my hands), I spent a good deal of time looking into my family's genealogy and finally getting it all down in one place.  Both my brother and I had had to do family history projects for school multiple times through middle and high school (you can guess who did a lot of the work and who did a lot of citing of somebody's work), but I had never really gone into it as deeply as I could, digging through the histories made available to me and speaking with the remaining patriarchs and matriarchs of my family until last summer.

And not to say that I couldn't have done better.  A lot of the work had been done by one of my more distant cousins to look into my mother's father's side, but was kinda scattered across lots of bits and pieces in books and emails.  But I was able to get a great deal of it down, getting all the way back to the late 1600s where one of my forefathers served as an original settler of what would become New Hampshire.  We had always known that the family tree headed up north to the Maine/New Hampshire/Canada region, but to be able to go back far enough to learn of Richard Cater (later, Carter) was really mind-blowing.

I've been holding off on getting back into it because I don't quite have the resources I had being back north, and access to the documents I would if I was there (especially on my father's side, the Syrian/Lebanese connection and then New York/German thing are going to get messy, I can already tell).  But I think I'll start reviewing so I can get ready for another journey, and maybe I'll even write about it a little bit.  Thanks for the inspiration, TNC.

For those of you who have never given a second thought to who these incredible people were that led to the nearly improbable existence of your life, I strongly recommend to give it a looking into.  No matter who these people are that led to you being here, they don't define you - I'm of the mind that the greatest people write their own stories with the present rather than the past.  But every person whose momentary existence seemingly is a mere flash in the history of everything has used their time to write their own story, a story which eventually leads to you.  Sparkling vampires and wizards are nice and all, but great stories have you feel connected to the protagonists - and what is more connecting than the blood coursing through your veins, and choices that lead to you miraculously coming into being, and the love that binds family together?