I WANT!

  • Ancestors with names like Rudimentary Montagnard or Melchizenick von Steubenhoffmannschild or Spetznatz Giafortini, not William Brown or John Hunter of Mary Abbot.
  • I want ancestors who could read and write, had their children baptized in recognized houses of worship, went to school, purchased land, left detailed wills (naming a huge extended family as legatees), had their photographs take once a year, --subsequently putting said pictures in elaborate isinglass frames annotated with calligraphic inscriptions, and carved voluble and informative inscriptions in their headstones.
  • I want relatives who managed to bury their predessors in established, still-extant (and indexed) cemeteries.
  • I want family members who wrote memoirs, who enlisted in the military as officers and who served in strategically important (and well documented) skirmishes.
  • I want relatives who served as councilmen, schoolteachers, county clerks and town historians.
  • I want relatives who religiously wrote in the family Bible, journaling every little event and detailing the familiar relationship of every visitor.
  • In the case of immigrant progenitors, I want them to have arrived only in those years wherein passener lists were indexed by National Archives, and I want them to have applied for citizenship, and to have done so only in those jurisdictions which have since established indices.
  • I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, who joined every patrimonial society they could find, who kept diaries, and listed all their addresses, who had paintings made of their houses, and who dated every piece of paper they touched.
  • I want forebears who were wealthy enough to afford, and to keep for generations, the tribal homestead, and who left all the aforementioned pictures and diaries and journals intact in the library.
  • But most of all, I want relatives I can FIND!

[Source: Barbara Brown, http://www.iigs.org/newsletter/9808news/index.htm.en]


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