Most people get into genealogy because they want to discover a link to a famous person or find hidden mysteries about their past or because they have ridiculous amounts of spare time. But for me, aside from that other stuff, the draw has also been the fascination and examination of the seemingly wasted or semi-wasted life. The what ifs. When my father was twelve, my grandfather committed suicide. What if he hadn't? My great aunt also committed suicide, after retiring from her job. Her suicide note suggests she was depressed and felt there was nothing left for her to live for. What if she hadn't given up? On another side, my great great grandfather was divorced from my great great grandmother, when my great grandfather was still a toddler. He grew up without a father, and he and his sister had a decades long feud regarding money and property eventually gained from the absent father after he passed. What if they hadn't grown up fatherless? What if they hadn't fought so bitterly about money, that the acrimony never allowed them to reconcile? On still another side, my great grandparent's home burned and they lost two children in the fire. What if the girls had been saved, and not lost so young? What would their lives have been? What if my own grandmother, having lost her husband by his own hand and left with two small boys to raise, had chosen to remarry? What if my dad had grown up with a stepfather? How would my grandmother's life have been different if she had had a partner to share it with? Or what if she had remarried, and chosen poorly? How would any marriage of my grandmother's have affected my father or his children? Even more than that, what of the mysteries surrounding the pictures in the family albums of people we don't know . . . people dressed in period costumes with names lost to time. No place, no history, no story--we have no way of knowing if these lives were lived, wasted or a mixture of the two. I feel for all of these people, and the situations they found themselves in. I wish I had known them personally, and had a first hand glimpse of what each life was like--the bargains they made, the circumstances that surrounded them, and why each chose to deal with their problems as they did. I often wonder if they felt they ever had options, or what motivated each choice that eventually caused their stories to be written such as they were.
Although my family tree has its share of tragedy, it also has its success stories and its unknowns. And I'm not suggesting all lives that contain tragedy are wasted. But I think the lives really worth celebrating, the ones that I would deem successful or at the very least not burdened with waste, were the simple, boring lifespans that bound a hard working family together. The ones who seemed to care about one another until the obituaries were written and the subsequent generations found their own place. Not exciting or gripping, plodding in fact, but still I think I would like my life to be like one of those. Some tragedy, but not even partially wasted, not defined by what ifs. Just tied to the people I care about, walking shoulder to shoulder into time, into someones historical record, until the generation I represent fades enough so that it's hard to remember what life must have been like back then. Long cold in the ground, but not a waste.
