We are the chosen! In
each family there is one who seems called:
- to find the ancestors;
- to put flesh on their bones and make them live again;
- to tell the family story; and
- to feel that somehow they know and approve.
We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: “Tell our story”. So we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.
How many times have I told the ancestors:
- It goes to doing something about it.
- It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today.
- It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.
- It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us.
Queen, Fred, Evert, Ednat |
It is of equal pride and love that our mothers
struggled to give us birth. Without them we could not exist, and so
we love each one as far back as we can reach; that we might be
born who we are; that we might
remember them.
So we do.
With love and caring, and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they, and they are the sum of who we are.
So, as a scribe called,
I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the
next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line
of family storytellers.
That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before.
That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before.
By Delia M.
Cummings Wright
Re-written
by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson and edited and
reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943
Pictures and graphics added for this publicatioin
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