"Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: all these essentially human acts depend on memory.”
Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein"
“ Every time history repeats itself the price goes up".
Jason Gart
“There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound.”
Iris Murdoch
"A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born"
. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
To Genealogist Everywhere: We Are The Chosen
We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again, to tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.
Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us, "Tell our story!" So, we do.
In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before? How many times have I told the ancestors, "You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us." How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love for me? I cannot say.
It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who am I and why do I do the things I do. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish, how they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.
It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a Nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth. Without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do.
With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to the one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers.
This is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those whom we have never known before. So we do.
Author Unknown, but appreciated
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money than your novel 'Catch 22' has earned in it's entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
-Kurt Vonnegut, in the New Yorker Magazine
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