Know Your Ancestors!

It's been too long since I posted something here. I just ran across an excellent quote while searching for a piece of software to put up genealogy info about my family on the web (accessible only to my family memebers as a collaborative effort). This quote tells two of the sober reasons for knowing your ancestors:

• Oh, you have reminded me about my dream. I'd like to create my family's tree for my descendants. Everybody must know his history. I realize if all people had information about their ancestors, young people would be kinder and they would try to do something useful in their lives. ( from the reader's comments at http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/09/create-family-tree-charts-inside.html)
  

Knowing the stories of our people in quite a personal way, and even more personal as we get closer to ourselves in the family line, ties these people into reality. It places our parents and grandparents in a real life apart from us, prior to us (upon which we depend historically and linearly), yet deeply connected to us. Instead, when we do not know our genealogy our sense of parents and grandparents is tied only to our surviving memory from about the age of 5 and to the immediate sense of the moment and fading sense of the day.

So the person who said the above was absolutely correct! We might have a stronger sense of planning for the future to create a new extension of the past that is as great as the one we hear of that supports us. We would have greater respect for our predecessors, knowing that they belong not only to us, but to a timeline of others who stretch back into the fog of memory and that these people built a past out of which we arose and in which we still live.