Preserving the Past for the Future
Almost everyone would say that the single most important thing in life is family. Our children and grandchildren certainly, our parent and grandparents, sometimes our great parents are all central to our sense of self and help determine who we are and how we fit into the world at large. Yet, surprising few of us can even name our great-great grandparents or a single relative from generations prior to them.
Unless we are of Native American descent or we or our parents are immigrants, most of us are Americans because someone in one of those prior generations decided to leave their home country and come here looking for a better life for themselves and their descendants. Sometimes the stories of how our families came to the New World are handed down, but more often than not, even such momentous events are lost in the fog of history along with the names of our forebears. They need not stay lost. The study of genealogy can help us rediscover the names and relationships of our ancestors and form the frameworks around which we can reconstruct our family histories.
Genealogy is the study of family lineage. It traces both maternal and paternal lines that have been forgotten by the current generation back into the depths of history and restores them to our family. Family history recalls the events surrounding the lives of each of those ancestors, making them live again in our memories as we recount their tales.
If we think about our own place in our family lines, it is likely that our children’s grandchildren won’t even know our names, if they do, then perhaps we’ll be remember one more generation at best before we too fade away from the memory of all those living. Yet there is a way to help preserve our own heritage. By rediscovering the heritage of those who have gone before us, we create family tree that can be handed down to our children and their children and so on through the generations with each one adding their own names branching off from our own.
Family trees and the family histories that accompany them become living documents as they are added to by subsequent generations. Once the heavy lifting of searching back through history for the old records is done, it takes almost no effort for each new generation to add their own names.
The study of genealogy and the creature of a family tree is often looked at as a way to rediscover our lost ancestors from the past, but it is also a way to preserve our own names and send them forward into the future as we hand down the documents and records to our children and they to theirs, in turn.
