Connections

Have you ever thought about the path not taken?

The blur of events, especially over a long period of time, makes the consideration of “what if” questions fruitless and meaningless.  At the end of last month I couldn’t help thinking about a particular fork in my road that I did not take 41 years ago.

In 1977, I was in the middle of college, two years removed from high school graduation and two years away from an uncertain future.  I was at LSU majoring in history, mainly because of my enjoyment of the subject, more than any sense of how that study could become my profession.  My brother Peter had returned from a year of living with another brother, Jimmy, in Alaska.

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I have written about my father several times through the years, always in short forms like this—a newspaper column for Father’s Day that I wrote in the early 1990s, a long Facebook post on the occasion of his 100th birthday in 2015, and another long Facebook  post for Father’s Day the same year and repeated again in 2016. The snippets of description are all true to him, but don’t fully capture him—who he was to me and my brothers and sisters and who he is now, remaining in our memories and in our hearts.

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Since my last post, I had the opportunity to return to Covington, Louisiana, the place where I grew up. I traveled there for business as well as the opportunity to celebrate the April birthdays of three of my siblings. The dominant event was my brother’s party, marking his 65th birthday. 2018 is a big year for milestone birthdays among my brothers and sisters. To avoid incurring wrath, suffice it to say that one will reach 80 this summer, another 75 in September, and another has already attained the comparatively youthful age of 60.

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In my last post, I wrote about coincidental connections that link different sides of the same family.  I described and made conjectures about the single meeting on record that occurred between my maternal great-grandfather and my paternal great-grandfather on September 24, 1891, in New Orleans.

Another kind of connection among families is equally captivating.  Research reveals connections that occur between families who are unrelated, yet become linked when they are both swept up into the great events of history.   

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I have entitled* this ongoing blog post “Connections.”  It is entitled* to that title because so much of what makes family history and research worthwhile are the connections that we discover in the course of our work.  

There are the coincidental connections that we find, for example, when two ancestors from different sides of your family are in the same place.  

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Why is Family History Important? 

For those involved in researching their roots that may seem like an obvious question. Genealogy can be a source of joy, especially in those moments when three or four strands of seemingly unrelated evidence come together and you experience an AHA! moment. Many people have compared this work to completing a puzzle or solving a mystery. There are thousands of clues, but some lead to dead-ends, others lead to information you already have, and a few reveal new facts about long-gone ancestors. Those revelations are very satisfying and keep us working.

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