I think I first took interest in genealogy while looking at an old photograph in one of my mom and dad’s photo albums. It was a photo of about 30 or 40 people all posed in rows, front to back at a family reunion in Ravenna, Ohio. It was my dad’s mom’s family. It peeked my curiosity. I was related to probably everyone in that photo and I’d never met most of them, never heard of most of them and neither my mom or dad knew who many of them were. Any information they knew was sketchy at best.  I thought – how sad, there was a photo of relatives and family and no one knew who they were.

Years later I remember a conversation with my mom about the photo and that Grandma, my dad’s mom, was writing some names and dates that would help put names with the faces. Turned out she basically wrote out what she could remember about her family. Names, places, marriages with a few dates, but there was a lot missing.

I also remember a conversation with my Grandma where I was telling her about one of my friends that lived down the street from me. A lot of people lived on our street. There were 12 kids in our family. The neighbors 4 doors to the left had 6 kids, Two doors down across the street they had 5 and 4 doors down to the left another 12. I could go on and on but you get the point. On any given day one could field a full-blown football game with cheer leaders, ball boys and referees.

When I mentioned my friend’s last name my Grandma asked me what my friend’s mother’s first name was. On my reply she told me that his mom was related to us on her side of the family and that my friend and I were third cousins. I had no idea what that meant. I knew what a cousin was, as I had about 20 cousins at the time, but what was a third cousin? It made me more curious.

I used to enjoy looking through my parent’s old photo albums. They seemed to tell a story about our relatives and their lives. But that story was always imagined by me as I looked trough the albums.  I remember wondering who they were. What were their likes and dislikes- who were their friends and so on and so on. There were no written stories, no documentation, no names or dates  – and memories fade. The stories about the photos changed each time they were told. I remember feeling sad about that dilemma.

T.S. Elliot wrote – “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Most of what Elliot wrote is up for different interpretations, but the best one I’ve heard for this quote actually comes from a recent TV show I happened to be watching.  ‘We don’t fear death. We fear no one will notice our absence and that we’ll disappear without a trace.’