Firstly, to appreciate from whence I have come, the incredible past of those who came before me. This is beautifully expressed by Bill Bryson
in his A Short History of Nearly Everything:Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you.
Secondly, that I might dream of hitherto unimagined destinations, the amazing future that awaits those who come after me. H.G.Wells in The Discovery of the Future
, says:Out of our... lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
So I am into genealogy because my ancestors are just the most amazing people who overcame great obstacles in life and by doing so are responsible for my being. I want to know who they are and what they overcame so I can better appreciate who I am. I am also into genealogy because of the breathtaking vistas and destinies that await my descendants. I want to anticipate who they will be and the challenges they will face so I can better live my life now.
Somewhere John Wesley wrote, "I have thought, I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: just hovering over the great gulf; till a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity!"
That is what genealogy does for me. It evokes spiritual wonder!
See also: Garvie Genealogy
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