Walking on Down the Line

I have been pursuing my genealogical line since getting into the MyHeritage site and it has been really exciting to find ancestors further and further back, validated by distant cousins.  As I find new names of 5, 6 or 7^th generation grandparents I feel a deep connection with them.  And then I wonder about their lives, what they were like in personality how many children did they have, and so on.   It’s like personal archeology but with so much less to go on.  All we usually find are church archives that tell of birth, marriage and death.  Reflecting on these ancestors makes me think what a blessing (and a curse) social media can be for future generations to understand their ancestors.  Wouldn’t it be something to discover a great-great grandmother’s diary, or a 7^th great grandfather’s sea log? 

I know for most people these kinds of things don’t seem to mean much to them but since I was a little girl I have always wanted to know more about my family, perhaps because I didn’t have any relatives that lived in this country.  Over Christmas my siblings all turned to me and said “we should be writing down all Mom’s memories”.  That was a figurative “we” of course, they meant I should write down Mom’s memories.

So Mom and I are sitting down to start recording stories that will grow dim unless we document them now.  The first thing Mom says “wouldn’t it be interesting if we could look down on them, into the past, to see what they were doing?”  Which made me wonder if some day we won’t have the technology to capture the past through space travel.  Now wouldn’t that be something?  Wouldn’t you like to see how your grandparents interacted and lived in the 17^th century?  I think it would be just awesome to actually watch them but then, the next you will want to do is talk to them, right?  Slippery slope, my friends, slippery slope!