I've been interested in genealogy ever since a junior high school teacher assigned our class to interview our families and construct a family tree. It's a good thing she did, because I got valuable information from my grandmother (and other kin) who clued me in to many ancestors who may have eluded me later. I'm thankful for that, for I've been building on that original tree for decades now, and thoroughly enjoying the journey.

When I first started, we didn't have computers or online ancestral sites to assist us. We just had a notebook, a pen, an intense interest, and the drive to hunt out our family secrets in dingy corners of libraries, in musty storage areas of county courthouses, in graveyards, and by rolling through the seemingly endless miles of available microfilm. The juicy tidbits kept us going, and the occasional "gold mine" of information that sometimes flooded in kept us hooked!

I'm basically the only one in my family who likes to do this. Oh, I'll get on a tear chatting up my kids or grandkids about what great-grandpa did or the illustrious ancestor who put his name to the Constitution. But little do they care. They don't yet see all the hours that have made me to know the history of it, the struggle, the interwoven connectedness that makes royals of farmhands and commoners of kings. And I love each and every one of their stories!

That is what provokes me to carry on, hoping to find another glorious nugget around the next bend that will weave these ties all together. And yes, I'd like to write a book about it, and no, I have no idea how to pull this all together. But I wanna try.

Along with the names and the dusty dates, I'd like to at least pass on some of the real family stories that make it all come alive. About my starving German Palatine relatives who took refuge in a Pennsylvania wilderness. About the persecuted English Catholics who first found toleration in Maryland, but were driven out again to resettle as bonded groups in Kentucky. About the independent Irish who, faced with signs in New York reading "need not apply," scrapped on anyway, eventually finding work with the railroads and a new life in the Midwest.

The one thing that completely surprised me about my family was how early many of my ancestors came to this country, some even in the 1600s. How many fought in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War (on both sides), in the great World Wars and beyond. And how both my children ended up doing overseas military deployment, once meeting up in the same sand-blown camp in Kuwait where they endured the soldier's life together.

And then, we genealogists have all found the black sheep in our families. The crooks, the skinflints, the killers, even, or the debauched. But I like to think of them as wayward wanderers who never quite fit in or discovered the Lord's plan for their lives. As the saying goes, "There but for the grace of God go I." And oh, how that GRACE can make a difference!

That is what I wish for all families, God's salvation and joy during our lifetimes, and at the time of death, His loving arms welcoming us home. For you see, it DOES matter what we do, and say, and sow, and reap, and the legacy we leave behind. For the Bible says He is the vine and we are the branches. And come to think of it, that is SOME family tree!!!