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. 

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