Minding The Children...

Maybe it doesn't much matter when you manage to reach the 1500's and there is a family of six children and you miss one out...

Doesn't matter to them after all...they are long gone, crumbling into dust in some country graveyard. Their tombstone bent over from the harsh winter winds...names barely decipherable...roughly carved out by a man with a sharp implement who didn't leave himself enough room after 'here lyeth'

But it does matter doesn't it...to quite forget little Elizabethus who struggled to make it to the age of two before succumbing to a fever...

If I forget to include her...if I think it doesn't much matter...then whatever is the point of making up a family tree.

There is no point at all...unless everyone's name is down...there's little to be achieved by simply adding those who are in your direct lineage...

Time and time again I see trees where siblings are left out...the only one added is the direct Gt Grandmother ten times, not her siblings...not the baby baptised in haste or the brother who died when he was ten of Typhus or Smallpox...

I add everybody. I add the children and the children's children...the stillborn babes and those who never reached adulthood...they deserve to be remembered.

Something I read recently said roughly...'They are not forgotten until the last person speaks their name'...

If I'm the last person to acknowledge baby Gabriel then so be it...he'll take his place on my convoluted family tree.