Sonny and the Crew

 One of the benefits of genealogy is you get to be a detective and imagine lives from clues. You also get to look at loved ones and think "the world has seen this before" or "ahh, now I see why".

I never met my father-in-law. For the early years of our marriage, V's father was a very (very) rare late night phone trip. But when he did, he was quite the tripper. 

I can still remember our first conversation. There was a string of words presented to me that rang like poetry and made me have to think - while at the same time making no logical sense whatsoever.

There is no way in this world could I ever imagine my father in the same communicative space as him.

But when you open the doors to generations above, you realise that you are cracking the books on whole different genres of lives.

In the last years of his life, however, he was a regular Saturday afternoon converser. Over several conversations he gave me clues about his family. 

(It's such a pity we have the technology in this day and age to be concerned about privacy that I obscure it, because it's a really cool name.)

Now that I have started to scratch the surface on the family tree, while I have not yet found one or two mentioned who were real people in his recollection, the few that I have found makes up  for some of that.

Another benefit of genealogy is seeing the real impact of economics and geography on groups of people through time, as well as the social effects of education and religion and alcohol and music and sugar and sobriety and shame and acceptance through a lens of history.

So while I can find five generations of working with animals going back through the same names on different continents in this section of my family library (mimes a bookshelf), there and there I have two sides of Crimean War fallout,  here we have several generations of marry early, marry often, and light on the paperwork trail Americans wandering around Missouri from Civil War days (I have now learned at least three things more about Missouri in the  Civil War) before the desperate gallop each generation to get to California.

It's been very enlightening.