It is later tonight as I write this. I spent all day with Rhiannon at a large library working on family history on my paternal grandmother’s side. I don’t want to bore you with this, but trust there is actually some spiritual merit to all of this. This posting may take two days to complete, but at the end, I promise there will be some thoughts to challenge the Christian!
Even before the birth of our first grandchild, Emma, I prayed for the descendants that will come after me, should the Lord tarry. Emma is such a joy to our lives right now. We delight in being with her. She recently turned one and is very active and curious. She reminds me that my life will not go on forever, but that she will follow living her life and so will other generations until the Lord’s return.
After searching all day through eye-straining sheets of endless microfilm of handwritten public records of New England, we never found the actual name we were looking for. But at the end of this amazing day, I asked my daughter what we had learned. You have to understand, I am not as computer literate as she is and it sure seemed like she was sifting through all this info at lightning speed. It nearly made me dizzy at times. She assured me we confirmed all the information we had and pieced together some of what we had only as suspicions before. It resulted in being able to form a family lineage through my grandmother that stretches back 13 generations in the United States to the original ancestor who arrived here around 1644 only about 24 years after the landing of the Mayflower. He was born in England and we were so far unable to access information about his parents. We learned that public records were not kept much before 1650 in any country. The next best source for records are probate courts listing wills and churches listing christening records. Some sources we checked today believe that this original relative arrived here at about age 12. We can’t be sure about that yet. That’s a search for another day!
It was so exciting to us to finally know for sure who our great, great, greats, were and where they came from. What is it in the human personality that has such a need to connect to something more lasting and far beyond ourselves? I think I learned today that in all the searching and at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going. As a Christian, I know someday I will go to heaven and be face to face with my Lord. That’s the most important thing.
Tomorrow I’ll write a few more observations that I learned in all this searching. Also a few more details of where we went after we left the library. Some of you who are reading this blog will be very interested in where our travels landed us since it includes your family line as well! Stay tuned until tomorrow and meanwhile, be thankful that if you are a Christian that you are a child of God, grafted in to His family by the blood of Jesus.