Cancer Schmancer

At Christmas, my mother gave me a family heirloom, worth some dollars, to be sure, but much more valuable than that to me for the connection to a specific person in our family. She is someone long dead, whom I never met, but who had some adventures in her life, I think. She did well enough to leave small bequests to several of her relatives, including my grandmother, and that is how this heirloom has come to me.

I have recently been spending a lot of time on my family tree and at the same time wondering why it should fascinate me so. I have reached two conclusions. The first is that we all love stories and to hunt down stories of one's own family is a delight that feeds both the ego and the nosey parker in me. Each fragment of a past life that I find is like this heirloom I now possess. The story belongs to me (as well as to everyone else in my family) and has great value and meaning because it is connected to real people who lived real lives and who are connected to me.

My second conclusion is that this detective work is a way of leaving something for my children. I can leave them material things, a few anyway, but these quickly lose their value and most have no meaning. But if I can leave them some stories, some sense of who went before in their various family lines, then that is a special bequest. Maybe 50 years from now, one of my sons or my daughter will read about one of their ancestors and be amazed, or delighted, or inspired.