it's all in the genes

For the past month I've been working on my children's genealogy tree. I started the project over 10 years ago, did quite a bit of work on it back then and then got sidetracked. After seeing a TV program about genealogy two months ago, the bug has become active inside me again. The project consumes long periods of time searching for the next fact to fit my puzzle. Fascinating and addictive is how I would describe the process. Birth, marriage, children, residences, and death are the parts of the puzzle for each individual which I search out.

There are more resources online now than there were 10 years ago. Accumulating facts is one thing, but imagining how the different families survived is another. Life was difficult for these families not so very long ago. Many children did not live past early childhood because of disease. Many didn't survive birth. The sorrow that parents and siblings must have suffered seems overwhelming in some families. I've found a handful of mothers that died during childbirth and within months their husbands remarried a local widow who recently had lost her husband also, both families with lots of little children each. Large families by today's standards are repeated over and over as I fill in the blanks.

On both my mother and father's side of the family are Germans from Russia going back as far as the 16th century Germany for some of the family lines. It wasn't called Germany then but that's the geographical area from which they came. Other familial backgrounds my children can identify with are Finnish, Norwegian, Scottish, British, and German again on their dad's side. There are a whole lot of farmers and laborers in the bunch. The original immigrants to America came between the mid 1600's to the early 1900's.

I've been able to connect with several cousins who represented branches of my tree that were blank. I had the common ancestor, spouse, and children by name only. Four generations later they show up in my inbox asking questions about our common relative and we help each other fill in missing generations on both of our trees. There was an immediate kinship felt. It definitely produced in me a sense of awe and appreciation for mankind in general. We are all in this thing called "life" together.

I figure it will take me about 3 months more to finish the project.

In addition to all that stuff, I haven't stopped reading. I recently finished Dan Barker's godless. He was a music evangelist back in the 60's and 70's in southern California in the charismatic movement. He wrote children's musicals and traveled. He's co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation today.

Currently I'm carrying around the book Why I Became An Atheist by John W. Loftus. He's a former evangelical preacher/apologist who got to thinking too much. His is a similar story to mine... disillusionment, introspection, study, and reinvention.