For the past few months I’ve been looking into my family history, posting here as I went. Now it’s all in a new section of this website.
I’ve been curious about this story for more than fifty years. In 1973, when I was ten, I asked my parents if we had a family tree. “No,” came the answer, “but let’s make one.” Sitting at our kitchen table in Fairview Heights, Illinois, Mom and Dad jotted down the name of every ancestor and relative they could think of. They tossed out names to each other, pausing occasionally, then suddenly blurting out a name that meant nothing to me. In his perfect cursive handwriting, Dad wrote down names that went back two or three generations, with lines connecting them, until they could think of no more. That tree went back about 80 years. Today we can go back more than three centuries.
I took on this project to preserve some of the stories that explain our past, and to honor other family historians who came before me—whose work I am merely extending.
With nineteen families to cover, and dozens of ancestors and relatives, this work is little more than a summary of those who came before us. It’s impossible to tell anyone’s story fully. For some I know little more than their name—probably misspelled. But I hope I have at least captured the essence of some of their rich and varied lives.
There is no such thing as a complete family history. Even the King of England can only trace his ancestry so far. Considering a family’s history is like peering up at a contrail, the line of water vapor behind a moving plane far up in the sky. Behind it, the dense white line turns into blobs, then puffs, then nothing. Anyone’s family history is like that. Here’s what I see when I look up at ours:
Michael Durbin 