I found this in a book I'm reading and thought it could apply to family trees...
'I will create an act of remembrance more powerful than a thousand prayers'
Because it is an act of remembrance is it not, to search out those who came before you...those you never knew but are part of who you are now...
They may lie in forgotten graves in old churchyards...their stones smothered in grasses...or perhaps they rest under a plain white cross in a foreign land...having died in a conflict far from their home. Some are buried in neat and orderly graveyards...the grass mown and tidy gravel paths...others lie un-marked and un-heeded...just a number on a board outside the burying place.
It doesn't matter if your most distant ancestor was a Viking...or an Icelandic Princess...it matters not if your entire family consisted of farm labourers who fed the population of England or Ireland with their hard toil...or if you gleefully find a direct connection to Diana Spencer...those people are your kith and kin.
From the shape of their faces to the arch of their eyebrows...from the colour of their hair to the hue of their skin...to the quirks, like the way they laughed or the lift of the corner of their mouth when they found something amusing...
The ones who showed their rebellious side and became Quakers...those who upped sticks and travelled to Australia or America...the slightly dodgy cousins who stole and robbed and became footpads or highway men and the staid Yeomen who slept on feather beds and had many children.
If we are lucky there'll be photographs of stiff unsmiling couples dressed in their wedding finery...or those of elderly men holding their hat and scowling at the man with the camera...do you detect a resemblance? This is your Great Grandfather...without him you'd not be here.
If it were not for that Icelandic Princess who travelled across rough seas to marry my fifteen times Great, Great Grandfather I'd not be here...living a quiet life in Ireland...
Were it not for that family who decided to join the Mayflower fleet bringing with them sturdy wooden chests filled with linens and the best crockery...the pet bird in his cage and the family cat...you wouldn't be living in an Orange grove in Florida.
I think we have a need to remember them...the little girl who was your first cousin three times removed who made Straw Hats...the Yeoman who left monies in his Will for a stained glass window to be installed in his village church...the landed gentry whose marble effigies lie in quiet country churches...
What better way to remember them than to include every last person...every still-born baby...every poor soul who died in a Workhouse...
Those people are worthy are they not...you can't recall them all, of course you can't...but you might well have the sense of humour they once had...you might have inherited your laugh or the way your mouth turns up to the little girl who spent her days weaving straw bonnets or the young man who died in the Boer War...who is to say you wouldn't have an immediate connection to that Yeoman who owned forty acres of land back in 1600...you could well sit beside him and think how strong the resemblance to your brother...
We need, I think, to acknowledge those who came before us...if that means including every single child of a family...every single distant cousin...what better acknowledgement can there be than to include them in your family history...to assure them they are not forgotten.
