Legacy

I have undertaken this ancestry research as my legacy to my children, my nephews and niece, and to all of their children.  I believe that our life on earth is fleeting and our physical being is not our eternal reality.  However, our sense of self on earth is partly derived from our place in history.  Seeing ourselves on a timeline of people who have come and gone gives us a more authentic perspective.

There is so much family history that died with my grandparents and with the scattering of family records among their descendants.  I am grateful for my youthful urgency in interviewing my great grandmother Zaun before she died.  I was not yet even a teenager, but sat down at the bedside of my Nanny and wrote down all of the names and dates that she could remember about her family.  There were tears in her eyes as she struggled to remember some of the details about her brothers and sisters.  From her memories, I painstakingly created a poster of our family tree (with fountain pen and ink cartridge) that I still have.  This poster was the starting point for my Ancestry research decades later.

I hope that it will be meaningful to my children someday.  I have put all of the photos and documents in my possession on each of the profiles so that it is easy to tell who was related to whom and how we all fit together as a family.  I love my family and especially my children so much - I am so proud to be connected with them in this interesting family!