Throughout my childhood, I grew up hearing stories and tales of my mother’s family. I was always able to place faces with these stories because of the extensive photographic record my family kept. We would gather around the dinning room table and pull out the old, worn boxes full of photos and pass on the information relayed in the images to the next generation so they may in turn, pass this information to subsequent generations. This was not the case for my father’s side of the family. I never knew names or faces or stories. I only knew my father and grandfather for a short period of time and the potential photographic record that was kept is lost to me.
With the help of ancestry.com and the small amount of information my mother was able to give me, I have been able to begin constructing the other half of who I am. Some of these people added to the “family tree” are just guesses because I do not know how and or if I am actually related to them. There are very few photographs and they are always of “family” that married in. All I have to go off is a birth date, death date, and any census records I can find. I am making up the rest and settling for that. In the end these images can disappear and be lost and I will remain in place of them wondering how I fit into this world and how my ancestry influences my daily life.