Patching up some holes in my genes

I’ve been almost incommunicado this weekend because I’m about knee-deep in a little project that I’ve wanted to do for a while; having a baby on the way and some other recent things have brought it forward in the priority just a little bit. It’s time to clear some brush around the old family tree and take a look at it.

Using various online resources (the first of which is a page out of one of my previously mentioned “baby books,” filled out by my mother, without which I’d be dead in the water), I’ve accomplished what I think it a pretty impressive amount of work for having started a couple of days ago. One line, on my grandmother’s father’s side, I managed to get extraordinarily lucky on and trace all the way back to England in the 1300s with a fairly high degree of certainty thanks to someone else’s dazzlingly meticulous research. There’s some Scotland and Ireland in there too.

The sad thing is that there just isn’t very much solid information about the Green line. Either that, or it’s completely buried because, well, y’know, it’s such an uncommon and distinctive name, though I have managed to get as far as finding out that, unless I’m barking up the entirely wrong family tree, the Greens have been working-class and stuck in Arkansas for nearly 200 years, with allowances for minor excursions that always ended up back here within a given person’s lifetime. I’m really wanting to find out where that line comes from.

Sadly, unless I luck out some more and someone else has really done the legwork, some of what I really want to know will be lost – I’d really like to find out more of where various traits come from, physical and otherwise. Somewhere along the way, I hope someone’s preserved the stories. Because without that, the names don’t add up to much – it’s just a collection of names that culminates in a guy sitting at his computer looking at a collection of names. There are a few stories that one can infer, though – such as the Englishman who, with his one-year-old daughter, left for the colonies a year after his wife’s death. Or the married couple who both died in the same place on the same date, which would seem to be a good indicator of something terrible happening. Or the probability that, with all of the working-class, Arkansas-based Greens who probably wound up as farmers, it was a total coincidence that led to me being just the latest one to own a horse or two. Do I stand a chance of looking back and comprehending their lives any better than they would deal with looking forward and trying to envision mine?

Of course, there’s also a good chance I could be wrong about that tendril that reaches into 14th century England; I already found one boo-boo that I just have to chalk up to information-superhighway-hypnosis – I missed a “Jr.” at one point, leaving a generation gap that made it appear as though one of these English gentlemen waited until he was 97 to have the child whose name was next in the list…something which he also would’ve had to do 8 years after he died. Good trick!

Despite that one impressive strand that goes zipping back into what might as well be medieval times, there’s still a ton of work to do (and only 24 more hours before my free trial membership at Ancestry.com expires 😆 ). To be sure, I’m not using only that site; that one strand was connected by Ancestry.com, and then the LDS genealogy site, and then a private genealogy site, which led me back to Ancestry.com where I happened upon one extraordinarily well-researched family tree that brought me around third base and straight to home.

So, has all of this made me feel a closer connection to another part of the world, or to any specific person?

Not really. If anything, it’s made me feel very, very mortal. It’s humbling to think that maybe, just maybe, in nearly 700 years, one of my descendants might take an interest and look back at my family line. But it’s just as humbling to realize that in 700 years, I’ll be just one name among many, and maybe a birthdate, and maybe a death date, and maybe a wedding date, and if I’m really lucky, they’ll be fairly precise and not “circa.” All I can do to honor the past is to add that next name to the list, and do my best to make them the best person they can possibly be. And if enough people do that, maybe we’ll be making sure that there’ll be someone around to remember us in 700 years.

File that one under worthwhile endeavours.

P.S. I hope this will finally justify, for those who give me a hard time about it, my fascination with all manner of things to come from the U.K. Call it a karmic genetic expense write-off.