A wedding party, 1970
It is very hard to explain why genealogy is more exciting than I first thought. I guess the answer has a lot of different layers.
Ever since school, I always liked history, but not all the dates and facts teachers want you to remember. It was always the thought that if it wasn’t for an ancestor who survived through hard times (like times without microwaves, cars, roads or the Internet) we wouldn’t be here today. This curiosity about life in the past led me to attempts at finding out more about my own ancestors; who they were and what their life looked like. Due to the lack of suitable time travel options, I had to turn to old archives and records. Searching for Polish ancestors is nowhere close to the convenience of having nice, digitalised records (a reality in the UK), but, for me, it has an important bonus. When I go to a parish somewhere in Poland and read the actual book that holds the old parish register it gives me the feeling of a physical link to my past. I am holding something that my 4th great grandad touched or looked at when he came to the church to share and record a joyful or sorrowful experience. It gives me the feeling that the years and centuries have swished by me and suddenly I am looking into the old record with his eyes. Am I crazy? Maybe just a little bit, but who isn’t?
The other reason why I am so into researching my family history is that I like jigsaw puzzles. I know it makes no sense at first glance, but let me explain. When I was a child I loved putting jigsaws together – the bigger, the better. I loved the challenge of piecing together thousands of fragments until they formed a nice, shiny surface that I could glue together with a feeling of well-deserved pride. Piecing together my family history is just like that. You need good eyesight, determination, patience, persistence and a bit of stubbornness. It is better to start with a frame and easy to assemble parts (information you know about your parents or grandparents and people with unusual names) and then start filling spaces of a lovely blue sky or the red sun setting over a deep dark water of which you have only about 1500 pieces! Sometimes, when you have to pick up every single piece and try it on every possible angle and it doesn’t fit, you feel disheartened. Sometimes you put a piece in and you think it fits, only to find out few weeks later that it does not! But sometimes you pick a piece of a blue sky out of a pile of 1000 exactly the same blue, you try it and it fits! And this feeling keeps you going and holds your interest and immediately you know why you are doing it! When I find a new person I spent weeks looking for and all the dates and names suddenly make sense, I realise this is why I love genealogy so much. I want to build this beautiful jigsaw and glue it together so I will always remember where I came from, whose blood is running through my veins and how much strength is in that blood, but that’s a topic for another story.
Have a look at my family tree.
How about you? What drives you? What makes you tick?