Heritage

A note from my cousin Judi mentioned that she and her husband had, on a recent trip to New Mexico, visited a native American museum, and noted that her husband had native American lineage. I pointed out to her that so did she: my great-great grandmother was a Blackfoot. This came as a total surprise to her.

And while the percentage of Blackfoot blood grows smaller with each generation, it is there. I am quite sure that it is responsible for the fact that I still have all my hair and for my lifelong inability to grow facial hair (not that I ever wanted a beard or mustache, but the option for sideburns would have been nice.) But when Judi asked what more I could tell her about her great-great-great grandmother, I had to admit I knew nothing more, not even her name.

I'm not sure if it as a peculiarly American trait---ours being so large and so relatively new a country. ---or a human one, but by and large, the average American knows almost nothing of his/her family more than two generations removed. Unlike the rest of the world, where an entire family may live in the same village for hundreds of years, we are a people of movement, and increasingly of the moment. What do you know of your great-grandparents? What were their names? Where did they live? What did they do for a living? What were their daily lives like?

If we are lucky, we know or knew our grandparents as people. We knew their personalities, what pleased or displeased them, what they valued, their quirks and other personal traits. Some of us know something of our great-grandparents as people from family stories passed down through the years. But the farther removed we are from them in time, the less we know of them, until within the space of only a few generations, they...and even their names...are totally unknown to us.

By nature, the famous are remembered far longer than the average citizen. The more famous one is were, the more that is known about them and the longer that information remains known. Certain cultures venerate their ancestors, but I really doubt any of those who do so actually know anything at all about who the real people they are venerating actually were.

The fact is, of course, that each of us is allotted only a certain amount of time on this earth, and there simply is not enough time within that relatively brief time to possibly know everything we might want to know about our heritage and about the people without whom we would not exist

And like it or not, this is simply the way things are. What's past is past and is of relatively little importance to or interest to us. We can hardly keep up with our own present, let alone our ancestors' past.

But wouldn't it be nice to go back in time to check in on those who have gone before us? My mom told me that her own mother, who died when Mom was only nine years old, had a sharp sense of humor, and a wonderful laugh. I'd love to hear it.

There is little we can do, without considerable research, to learn more about those from whom we descended. But we can be conscious of the fact that they did exist, and that they were people as real as you, and every now and then, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, make a trip to a cemetery and spend a little time walking among the tombstones. and give those beneath them a passing thought...and a "thank you."

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