Roots

I've been working on compiling a family tree. Recently I found a copy of a book that my great grandmother, Carrie, filled out about 15 years ago, before her death, that prompted her with lots of questions about her life, and which has served as a window into the life of a really amazing woman. In one of the pages, she filled in a family tree going back to her great grandparents, and it totally fascinated me.

[my maternal great grandparents with my mom, 1953-1954]

So now, I'm making an effort to track down more information. There is something very basic about needing to know where you come from. I feel like technology is going to make it easy for our generation to be "remembered" through photographs and digitized information. It makes me sad that already so much information about my relatives has been lost, their birthdates, their birthplaces, the names of their siblings.

[my mom, and my grandma]

The next step, obviously, will be deciding how to display and catalog this information, and I'm struggling with a workable design for a family tree. This is about to sound very cheesy, but I've been Harry Pottering lately, and I wish I could have a huge tapestry filled with all the faces and names of my relatives, reaching out and covering an entire wall. I really do love the idea of that.