Word for today: ancestors After years of saying I was going to do a genealogy, yesterday I finally went online and started to trace back my family tree. I’m not sure why I thought this would be a cinch, but once I started it the realization dawned on me that like any other tree, there are a seemingly endless amount of branches. There’s documents to review, people to rule in and rule out. Family names I had not expected to find popped up, others I thought would be a cinch proved elusive. I finally just randomly picked one side of one branch and decided to take it to wherever I could with the time I had available. I found my way back to 1790, John White who came over from Ireland and married, and had 8 or 9 children. John is my great great great grandfather. I’m not sure how to trace him back into Ireland itself, but given a chance I expect I’ll make a trip to Dublin or Belfast to tackle that once I get a little more done on this end. I was fascinated by the way things change over time. Families were huge in comparison to most today. For at least 2 generations the number of children were at least 8 per family. Now most of my friends have 2 or three kids max. I’m surprised by the local nature of the extended family. Aside from John White, everyone else on that particular branch married someone who was local. From the burial records I viewed, most lived out their lives in the town they were born or one practically next door. Names were passed down as middle name honors, so if your grandfathers middle name was Wesley, Howard or Nathaniel ( two prominent names running throughout the years) there was a tendency to name your son with that middle name too. I like that tradition. I know my own middle name- Lucille- was my grandmothers. My younger sister’s- Louise- is the other grandmother. I treasure the fact that I carry a name forward of someone who had a lot to do with my presence here. It makes me feel connected to things that came before my arrival. Earlier this week a prince was born in England. If the monarchy lasts, he will one day become the King of England. His fortuitous arrival into a specific family who’s ancestors ruled England gives him more advantage and responsibility at birth than almost any other child born in recent years. His ancestors are his pedigree, a passport into a life of privilege that most of us will never know. The family lines of princes and princesses that came before him have practically guaranteed him a future without want, and one without a lot of personal choices either. Who he will be to others will largely be dictated by protocol and expectation. While it’s enviable in one sense, it’s a gilded cage. Everything he does will be watched with an eye for decorum and position. In the Bible lineage links the two testaments via the line from King David. It was incredibly important for the authors of the gospels in the New testament to draw the links in black and white showing that Jesus was the chosen one because he descends from the prophetic line foretold in the Old. What’s interesting to me is the only time we really remark upon this fact now is in the Christmas story. It’s a footnote, but at that time it was everything. Today what’s lingered as the more important reality of Jesus ministry is the radical nature of his message. He does not flaunt his position in any narrative, instead almost entirely ignores it and allows others to make those connections. His mission was not to tell people who he was, it was to tell people who they were to be in the world. The ancestry is only relevant to those who doubt. To those who believe, no pathway backward matters- only the one that leads forward. While the past can certainly help launch someone into the stars, it is not enough to keep them there. What one does with their background or in spite of it is everything. I will be surprised if I find anything in my own family tree that leads me toward any wealth, title or nobility. That’s not my family, we are just hard working simple folk who came from families that loved and cared for each other. They struggled together, I’m betting most of them had trouble putting food on the table and clothing the children they so proficiently produced. But one of the things that runs in my Irish/English blood is a love of the Lord. It’s there on both sides, My grandmother who loved and served her church for her whole life, my Grandfather on the other side who was a Baptist minister in the old tent revival days. That my friends is a treasure and a gift no royal title could render.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:51:07 +0000
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