Connected

I was born hooked on family history. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting beside my father in his basement home office asking him how to spell the names of ancestors so I could put them on my own pedigree chart. I must have been five or six years old as spelling “Daniel” stumped me without my dad’s help. I continued to draft several copies of that pedigree chart as a child. None of those very early efforts survive, but I still have a long-form pedigree chart that I completed – in various inks, with various disastrous attempts at cursive, and with a suspicious looking stain – in the third grade. It’s framed and resides on my office wall and reminds me of my humble origins – of a time when I did not know genealogical standardized date format, or the usefulness of capitalizing surnames to distinguish them from middle names. But it also reminds me of something more.

I have long since memorized most of the information contained on that sheet, but its physical presence is a reminder of evenings spent beside my father asking the stories about these people – all but one of whom died before my birth. As the youngest of nine children even my own siblings’ childhood experiences felt just as lost in the mists of history as my parents or grandparents’ pasts. Stories from my parents connected me not only to the dead whose names I laboriously wrote on that sheet, but to them and to my brothers and sisters. The framed pedigree chart therefore forms a connection to those long dead, to a family past I know only from photos, and as my parents approach their mid-eighties it returns me to a time when parents knew not only how to solve spelling problems, but seemingly knew the answers to all of life’s questions and knew how to impart them to inquisitive six-year-olds; to a time of childhood innocence and trust and possibility. Not too bad for a piece of paper.