I have a confession to make. I grew up in a family that was big on family history. My mother had traced her family tree back several generations to Hawaiian monarch King Kamehameha and to a Japanese orphan who ran away with a Chinese circus. My father had his roots traced back through the Mayflower to William Wallace of Braveheart fame (a matter of great pride to our family, by the way. Freedooooooommm!). They have dozens of stories for each person in those lines.
Now, maybe it’s because all the work had been done for me. Maybe it’s because filing through microfiche didn’t really appeal to me in my youth. Maybe I just took all of that history for granted. But I never really picked up the family history bug. I loved the stories but never really considered searching for them on my own. So, this is my confession.
So, what do I do about it? It only seems reasonable to pick up where my parents left off. After all, we haven’t quite reached Adam (or Australopithecus, depends on which you believe in). There are stories yet to be unearthed. I’m not looking forward to hunting down vital records, death records, birth records, all of those slippery documents. But I am looking forward to learning their stories, finding who these people were who contributed in some small way to my gene pool.
Do you have any family history confessions? Maybe you have an ungrateful kid like me who takes it all for granted? Tell us about it below!
