My Journey:

Once again, I am short on a topic for a month.  I keep wondering why I put this off for a couple of extra weeks, as then I run into the problem of trying to remember what happened in the month I am talking about (in this case, November), rather than in the two weeks since.  It's a case of relative history being at the forefront of my mind, but not the part that I am supposed to be talking about.

Well then, so November has come and gone.  Therefore, the year is nearly gone.  I guess I should do some Christmas shopping.  With Christmas on Thursday, I can always put it off until the day before.  I do have the day off.  But this all does bring up the concept of relative time.  I remember as a kid that this part of the year seemed to go so slow.  I remember having three distinct holidays:  Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.  These would then be followed by the new year, and we'd start things over again.  I do miss those days.

On the other hand, as I do genealogy research, it often amazes me when I stop and think of the era that I am researching.  OK, so I find an ancestor who was born in the 1790s, had children around 1820 - 1840, and died in the 1870s.  (Specifically, I have been in contact recently with Everett Decker, and he is helping me to fill in the family of Ira Decker, son of Jacob Cornelius Decker and Asenath (Rosina) Barden.  This would make Ira my third great grandfather's second cousin (thank you, relationship calculator).  Now, as I go in and fill in the dates of the major life events, birth, marriage, children, death, ...  it is very difficult to stop and grasp the times that this person lived in.  He was born in 1796, while George Washington was president.  He lived through the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and at least one of his sons, Charles, serviced in the Civil War.  He was born at a time when the best way to travel was by boat, and died during the heyday of the railroads and westward expansion.  He had at least ten children.

I'm not really sure that I have a point in this discussion, other than time is relevant, depending on the topic under discussion.  When I look at how fast things seem to go during these hectic times, it's amazing to look back at other times and put time into proper perspective.  This can make it amazing to me to look at history as not something that happened a long time ago, but something that happened during the lives of my ancestors.  When I visit a church that my ancestors attended (with the ultimate being the Kingston Reformed Dutch Church, formed in 1660), I look at it as a part of my family's history, and therefore a part of my history.  The same goes for cemeteries, battlefields, homes, and even towns.  I wasn't necessarily greatly interested in Gettysburg, until I discovered that my great, great grandfather had two brothers who died in battle there.

When looked at outside the context of one's own life, and through the eyes of a family, time takes on a very different (and more important) meaning.  And maybe that can help explain why I enjoy this process so much.

last modified December 15, 2008

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