Tree of Lives

I began a genealogy project in the mid 1990’s when the LDS records first came on line. I happened to hear the announcement on a morning news show and my curiosity was piqued. It led to discovering a body of research that a great aunt had compiled when she was researching a membership for the DAR and/or the Mayflower Association.

I knew she was interested in the subject. She would visit with carefully handwritten diagrams on graph paper and point out the names with the point of a No2 yellow pencil.

I recommend the experience to anyone who has the time, and resources to follow their personal "Tree of Life " down, from these leafy branches,  toward the roots from which we all spring.

My family is a an incredible mix of national origins.
I was able to trace my maternal grandfather's line back beyond the 1100's in Europe and found records that dated to the Crusades...
A common theme, all through those branches, was religious separation from the ruling institutions.
Some ancestors arrived in this country as early as 1600, others arrived as late as the 1930's. Some 40 family groups made their home on Cape Cod and in New Hampshire, and Vermont from 1600 until the frosts of the "year with no summer", in the early 1800's, drove them West to seek more generous lands and climates..

My maternal grandfather was both a sailor and a marine who married a woman from Nicaragua. Was she descended from native people of the Central Americas?? Who bequeathed her Spanish surname?? Where did they come from??

I managed to locate handwritten records of births and deaths and marriages in the Civil Registry of Managua and discovered the names of an aunt , a cousin, and my great grandparents from Santo Domingo, a district in Managua.

The experience opened some fascinating doors and led to new ones which may never be breeched..
Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Germany, England, Switzerland, Kentucky were all represented in my maternal-grandfather's family.
Sailors, miners, a civil war prisoner who died in Andersonville.
, and my mother's Dad was just one of four grandparents...

Who were the others...??
Where did they come from??
The quest seems unending and nearly every day adds a fact or a photo or a connection.

One of the most interesting experiences was that finding their names and even identifying some of their faces seemed to make history speak inside my cells. It made me aware of their time and place in history on a whole different level.

It led me to this quote by an anthropologist:

“When you go to traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures in the Amazon, and put this question to them, they answer without hesitation ...
   They say, 
‘Oh, yes, those are the ancestors.  Those are the ancestor spirits with which we work all of our magic.’

This is worldwide, and traditionally the answer that you would get from shamans, if you were to ask them how they do their magic.  
It's through the intercession of the helping spirit who is a creature in another dimension.

We may imagine many things, a future of technological and social innovation,
but I think very few of us have imagined the possibility that shamanism would be part of it, or that shamans are actually people who have learned to penetrate into another dimension.  

A dimension where, for want of better imagery, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present.