I’ve been thinking a lot about ancestry lately, inspired by the new writing project. My grandmother on my dad’s side was big on ancestry and record-keeping, and some years ago she gave my parents all of the records she found in tracing our heritage back as far as she could. No one else in the family was interested in holding on to them, and I’ve always been interested in ancestral lineages, so I have them all. I have plans to digitize them eventually, but…time.
My sister and I are the last two people in that family line, and as neither of us have children, it dies with us – a fact that is somewhat unsettling, but not enough to make me regret not having children. Still, I feel the need to preserve the records for as long as I’m alive, just for posterity’s sake.
The lineage on my mom’s side is a bit sketchier, though I do have some records for that as well. Perhaps someday I’ll try to hunt down more information and fill that out more completely as well. My mom has six siblings who all have children of their own, so that line is already continuing on for several more generations.
I think one of the things I find most interesting though is how certain likes and dislikes seem to have some sort of genetic component, which sometimes skips a generation or two, but always seems to show up eventually down the line.
With my paternal grandmother, for example – I never knew her well (or much at all, really), because she lived in another state and we couldn’t afford to travel that far to visit. But later in her life when she moved up here for the few years before her death, I got to know her better, and realized that we were actually quite similar in hobbies and personalities. It was almost spooky, honestly.
I have a lot of common interests with my maternal grandmother as well, but since we were much closer to her, that can be attributed to a lot of time spent with her as a child. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was “hard-wired” too, as it were. Genetics is a fascinating field, with more depth than I care to plumb, personally, but I do enjoy reading about past generations and seeing where I can identify with them (or not, as the case may be).
I’ve toyed with creating an Ancestry account or something similar, but privacy concerns have stopped me so far. There’s definitely a pull though for me to continue on that path and fill out the family tree. More for curiosity’s sake than anything else at this point.
Have you or someone in your family traced the family tree? Do you still have any old letters or documents from generations past? That’s really what I’d like to discover…old letters and journals are gold for learning about people’s lives.
It’s also why I’m conflicted about keeping or not keeping a journal…but that’s a topic for another post. 😉
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