The Strangest Thing that Ever Happened

I was "un-friended" today on Facebook by an old friend, and I was also told that our "friendship has come to an end." Not by a teenager, not someone I'd known for only six months, but a friend of nearly six years who is allegedly an adult in his own right. I'm completely amazed.

I have lots of friends I disagree with, and lord knows I'm opinionated. However, while I love all my friends dearly, I especially respect and love those who have different opinions than mine because they challenge how I think, challenge the way I view the world. I think it's profoundly important that we surround ourselves with people who do not agree with us 100%, otherwise we get a skewed view of the world and the other remarkable people who inhabit it.

I'm fairly certain my mother is the only one who reads this blog, and I'm okay with it. I try to let it be somewhat funny, because after all, hunting dead relatives is a very silly hobby, but also I want it to be something that points out the ridiculousness in how people behave. I don't mind when people point out the ridiculous in me... coming to terms with the worst parts of ourselves is probably the greatest challenge we face in our lives.... but if you don't point out to me WHY the behavior or statement is wrong, or misleading, then you aren't providing me with an opportunity to grow. I say this because the content of this blog was cited as one of the reasons our friendship had to end, but my old friend refused to elaborate. Again, I'm amazed. I think the worst thing I've done on here is to allege my ancestor was serial killer, and she's several generations dead, so what does she care?

People become crazy about genealogy, but ultimately, who really cares about any of it? Only those of us who search out these dead individuals who contributed in some distant way to who we are. For every woman who doesn't research, or every guy who declares I'm not a member of a family, there are hundreds of genealogists who share photos, and stories and relish finding others walking the same path, even if the information they're looking for is different.

You know, the kind of people I would choose for friends.

In terms of my old friend, regardless of how he thinks of me, I will always regard him as a friend, and when I think of him, I'll send him light and love.... and then let it go.

Your Relatives are not Famous, and Neither are Mine.

Have you ever noticed how those people who believe in reincarnation were always someone famous in their past lives? They were a King, or a Martyr, or some other historical figure of great importance. I've had several people tell me they were Henry V, or Charlemagne, or even someone like Anne Boleyn in their previous life. They're never a serf, or a slave. They're never someone of dubious history, or someone downright evil. No one has ever, to my knowledge, claimed to be Genghis Khan, or Rasputin, or Robespierre. No one has ever claimed to be Hitler reincarnated.

The same is true of many family historians. They love to claim famous ancestors. So much so, that many so called genealogists actually doctor their family trees to support the tie to a legendary individual, instead of acknowledging that most of us are descended from the shoulders on which great men stood, rather than the great men themselves.

Case in point: Several nights ago I was at a dinner with a group of friends. A friend and I were discussing genealogy when another friend interrupted with the story of his supposedly researched family tree. Turns out this man sitting at that very dinner table was related to two Medieval Kings! Imagine! And incidentally, they were two kings that weren't related to each other! Imagine how blue the blood is in his veins! Wow. Of course, when asked how exactly they connect to my friend, he is unsure, even if it's on his father or mother's side.

Here's the thing, the vast majority of Americans tend to claim English royalty in their lineage, but there have been only 69 rulers of England, and only 40 since the Normans invaded in 1066. By contrast, there have been 44 United States Presidents.

We all want to be important, and genealogy is popular in the United States because we have a desire to find out where we came from. Humans are social and want to associated with a community, and we want to produce, or be, something of value to our world.

I'm like everyone else. I would love to find someone great in my family tree. I'd love to be related to a King, or an Indian Princess, or even a United States President-- preferably a well respected and loved one. However, to doctor my tree to create the illusion of a famous relative is dishonest, and I would always know it's not true. A hollow win isn't really a win at all, and it diminishes what so many of our other ancestors did do, which was to create a new life for themselves in a new, uncharted world. That's pretty legendary, even if their names are not remembered by the masses.

How The Story Ends

Until last week, I had never seen a photo of my grandfather before he was married to my grandmother. I had never seen him as a little boy. I knew he was born in Kentucky. I knew all the dates and names there are to know. I even found out he'd married someone before my grandmother, and that my father has a half brother out there somewhere. Family secrets just don't hold up against public records and a dedicated genealogist.

I was working online when another woman contacted me through Ancestry.com, and said she was a distant cousin, and had photos of my grandfather as a boy. She sent me copies, and I waited with baited breath for the ultimate goal of any genealogist, the elusive "identified photograph." When they arrived, I poured over them, and then proceeded to digitize them so I could put them on the site.

As I was loading them I saw it. I'd looked at the photo a dozen times at least, but this time I saw him. My grandfather, young, maybe not yet twenty, smiling the same smile my father has, the same smile I look at every day in the mirror. There he was, younger than I am now, before my grandmother, before my dad. A life full of opportunity yet to be lived.

His life flashed through my mind in the form of all the photos I'd seen of what came after this one. Marrying my grandma, enlistment, the war, the lifetime of service to Ac Delco in Flint, Michigan, riding motorcycles with my dad, the deaths of his parents, the accident that would claim his arm and make him the old man I knew in my childhood, the loss of my grandma, and finally, his own death.

Here I was looking at this photo of a young man with everything in front of him, and yet it was all behind him now. In that instant, I felt many things, among them, loss.

My "Gramps" died when I was only twelve, and his grumpiness in those days made me afraid of him. I really never knew him at all. What I would give to sit next to him with these photos and say, "Who was that?" "Where was this taken?" "How old are you here?" The stories connected to these photos are lost forever.

We look at photographs everyday and comment to each other on Facebook, or in family groups as they're passed around, "Oh, you look so young there," or "Wow, you looked so beautiful that day, how happy you were." Yet there will come a time when nobody knows anyone in the photos we leave behind. Someday, a descendant of mine will look at an old photo of me, taken when I was young, with my whole life ahead of me, and that descendant will already know how the story ends.