Adam and Eve

According to the Bible it all started with Adam and Eve.

As a genealogist one has to decide what their goal is when tracing your roots. Do you want to assemble the largest tree filled with names, dates of birth, dates of deaths, dates of marriages? Or do you want to assemble a smaller tree filled with the lives your ancestors actually lived?

Either choice is acceptable. Each of us has to determine for our selves which one is the one you wish to be.

I don't want to trace my family back to Adam and Eve. To do so would soon become boring to me. That's my choice. I'm really glad when I find the works of someone who decides to go back as far as possible. It's a great resource for me.

Personally I want to find all the documents my ancestors left. Each document tells a part of their story. With enough of those precious documents one gets a feeling of who that person was in life.

I realize none of the documents will tell me if my ancestor was truly happy. Or were they haunted by something they'd done in their past? Did my great, great, great, great grandmother on any side marry because she loved her husband, or was it out of necessity to make sure she had a roof over her head once she was old enough to be out of her father's house?

Each of us has a date of birth. And each of us will have a date of death. While those two dates are important, it's what we do in between those two dates where we live our lives. I know that when I reach my date of death, my goal is to leave a trail for my descendants to find that may tell them about the things that happened between those two dates.

Each of our ancestors was a human. At one point in their lives they had dreams. They had hopes. They had goals. We'll never really know what they were or if they were accomplished. But until I can feel the humanness in my ancestor, I leave them alone.

What usually happens is one day I'll stumble upon a document that belonged to the ancestor. By knowing a year range and with having an idea where the birth and death happened, I can save the document until I have more documents to prove this belongs to that ancestor. I use those two dates to narrow my search for the life my precious ancestor lived.

Do I need to go back to Adam and Eve? I don't.

I do need to find some record that said my ancestor lived their life.

My tree won't be a tree filled with tens or hundreds of thousands of names and dates. It will be a smaller tree filled with the life they lived.

It is up to each of us how we want our descendants to see us after we're gone. Will we leave only documents, or will we write a journal for our descendants to find?