"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. 
Not even when I'm a hundred."
Pooh thought for a little.
"How old shall I be then?"
"Ninety-nine," said Christopher Robin.
Pooh nodded.
"I promise," he said.

My daughter has the first line of this conversation on her wall, part of a lovely water color showing Christopher Robin holding Pooh, the two of them speaking earnestly about the Future.  I don’t know why she has this on her wall.  Maybe she just likes the artwork.  Maybe this was a reminder never to forget close childhood friends as she graduated high school and moved on to college.  Or, looking a little deeper, maybe it’s a reminder that memories are the only thing we can truly hold on to during the march of the years. 

Paul Simon wrote a similar message for the album Bookends:

Time it was and what a time it was,
A time of innocence, a time of confidences,
Long ago it must be,
I have a photograph,
Preserve your memories,
They’re all that’s left you...

“…Promise you won’t forget about me, ever,” said Christopher Robin as he realizes he is one day bound to grow old.  Pooh promises he will not.  Their intimacy pulls at our heart strings.

Some years after his retirement my father took my brother and me aside to present each of us with a chain link bracelet made of 14 karat gold.  “I wanted to get you guys something to remember me by,” he said.  He was looking up from the kitchen chair where he spent much of his final years dealing with peripheral neuropathy associated with diabetes.  His eyes held a mix of love for his sons and a plea not to be forgotten.  We were delighted with the presents (though one was eventually lost, the other sold to help make ends meet), but we looked back at him and told him the bracelets had nothing to do with our remembering him, that the high regard we both had for him as our dad meant more to us than anything.  "How could we ever forgot our father," we said.  This was the man who, probably more than any other individual, shaped our lives and made us men.  He would be an enduring part of our world.  Even fifteen years after his passing the memory of his wisdom, his generosity, his patient way is alive in me as I write these words.

Yet memories themselves are as fleeting as life.  If we strip away the illusions of day to day existence we discover that nothing is permanent.  To quote the old homily, we are here today, gone tomorrow, and this rubs against our innate desire for permanence.  In an impermanent world where even the great pyramids slowly crumble to dust we wonder what life is all about, why we are here and who will remember our passing.  Our ego-driven subconscious wants us to be remembered.  When we finally step out of that entrapment we discover that the mark of a truly successful life is how other people remember us, not if we will be remembered.  That shift of mentality is significant; we make our living more about other people and the difference we create in the world than about ourselves.  When we finally confront the apparent fact that we live and die all alone in the world and that life itself is a fleeting instant, we strive for meaning, for something lasting.  If we turn around our fixation with the self we suddenly have it correct: Instead of living to be remembered, we should each just live to our fullest capacity.  As with my father, if we do a good job of it we will be remembered. 

But that’s not enough for many of us.  Something nags.  What happened in the past is key to the present if only we could figure out how and why.  Driven by this need to understand my own roots, I have become more deeply involved with both the science and philosophy of genealogy.  I have come to understand that memories of family may be fleeting but that something else is going on behind the scenes that may put those memories back within reach.  True, tangible details of my ancestor’s existence have all but disappeared.  I can locate some of the milestones—when they were born, where they lived, married, raised children and died, sometimes an old house is still standing, or a gravestone marks a burial place—but that is like looking at the table of contents of a book when it’s the narrative you really want to enjoy. 

I can tell you about my father, and something about his father, but I never knew my great grandfather—Reverend William Henry Coleman—and only heard occasional stories about him.  After years of work to uncover some of the details I can tell you more about the man’s life, but I’m not yet certain I can convey his essence.  Was the man even a part of my life even though he died soon after I was born?  It somehow feels that way.  It should be that way, somehow.  It’s just that we haven’t known till recently exactly where to look for clues, and how it might be possible that part of his essence was in fact relayed to me in an intricate ribbon-like array of interconnected proteins—not that dissimilar from a chain link bracelet in fact.

My father’s gift of gold was an effort to translate his successful business career and his love for his sons into something tangible that would outlive him.  Perhaps he imagined that my brother and I would ceremoniously hand these mementos to his grandchildren one day, saying with sincerity “This was given to me by my father, and I hereby bequeath it to you as a token of his and my love.”  After all, my father did that for me—handing over a $10 gold piece dated 1913, made into a money clip with the family initial on it.  According to the story great grandfather William Henry had given each of his five sons a similar token upon sending them to military school as teenagers.  Receiving it when he was only 13 years old, my grandfather kept that coin thru the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Post War Recovery.  He handed it down to his son sometime during the 1950s after which his son, my father, gave it to me some twenty years later.  It’s pretty to look at.  It’s intriguing to know that great grandfather Coleman held the same coin in his hand a century earlier.  But eventually that coin too will be lost or sold.  It will disappear into the mists of time as all things do.  Just like the gold bracelets not even the memory of that tangible token of love will survive for long. 

Despite the inevitability of this fact, the hunt to discover more about our ancestors continues.  We want to know about their experiences and the persons they became.  Who were they, really?  What was life like for them?  How much of what they experienced is alive in each of us, and what does it say about our capacity to thrive?  Are we influenced today by the things they endured, loved or hated?  Is some of their belief and behavior still active in each of us?  In addition to jet black hair, an athletic frame, hazel eyes—whatever physical traits we may have inherited—did they pass along some of their knowledge too?  Even more interesting: why are we driven to know these things?  Is there something about the keen for genealogical information that might help us overcome even impermanence?  Might we discover a common thread linking us back in time, delivering in the present day fragments of our ancestor’s real experience, possibly even allowing us to encode specific information for future generations to discover?

We are a testament to our ancestor’s determination to succeed.  Unlike many of their peers our direct forebears did succeed.  They overcame trauma, disease, despair, failure, distraction—every imaginable challenge, injury, human failing or unexpected catastrophe—and somehow managed to procreate, nourish and educate so that we could survive in our day and time.  In biological terms, their ability to adapt to the environment of their day and time, their fitness, gave rise to us.  Did they thrive or merely survive?  Doesn’t matter, here we are.  But are we thriving in our day and time, or merely surviving?  Doesn’t matter, many of us will adapt, procreate, nourish and educate to the best of our ability.  Family lines will continue—so long as the planet itself can serve as home.

In the meantime the hunt for permanence continues.  Surely there is some element of our living that passes down to our heirs consistently, predictably, if only we had a better understanding of the mechanisms.  There are too many clues that something like that is going on.  There are the vivid dreams of days gone by.  There is that occasional, chilling knowledge of place that arises when we step into an environment we have never been to before only to know the place—the way it feels, the smells, the play of light, even what’s around the corner up ahead—not only as if we had been there before but as if we had literally lived in the location long ago.  There is the odd predisposition for certain talents—a capacity to play piano, say, just like grandmamma once did, even though we never had lessons; or that ongoing fascination—some say obsession—with certain periods of history that consistently call to us; or those seemingly random events that bring up memories of the past we could not possibly have known but that leave us breathless, sometimes incapacitated, till the ecstasy of the moment wears away.

Most people think of genealogy as a hobby.  As such it offers a vastly rewarding, informative journey into the past.  The resources available today make it possible to build a family forest, not just a family tree.  This is endlessly entertaining.  The real question is, what does it all mean, this ever-expanding ecosystem of family nodes, dependencies and flows?  Does the information we gather help us understand our current circumstances?  Can we improve our abilities?  Can we turn surviving into thriving? 

A Family 'Forest' depicting ancestry of the current generation male (lower left) backwards in time to Colonial America.  The male line is shown left as ten stacked generations tracking back to 1637 and the arrival of the original paternal ancestor to Glouster County, VA.  The rest shows maternal lines tracking to various early communities, including Plymouth, MA (1620, the Mayflower) and Jamestown (1607).  As busy as the graphic appears, it represents only about 30% of the total number of grandparents over 11 generations.

For me the answer is yes.  We learn we are descended from what I call main genealogical highways.  This results from religious, economic or political developments that motivated large numbers of people to behave in historically significant ways.  Significant historical events created trajectories, pathways, upon which groups of people moved in order to improve their quality of life.  When several of these pathways merged, genealogical highways served as literal migration corridors, along which major events were eventually recorded.  These events often left large scale emotional or psychological effects on the groups traveling these highways.  The collective consciousness was changed when large numbers of individual lives were affected by both ecstatic passion as well as catastrophic trauma.  This resulted in lasting effects that were at the same time physical, emotional, psychological.  Where chronic stress (including “eustress”) occurred, or where acute, massive stress happened, their bodies responded.  When individual physiology changes, we now know that cellular DNA can be changed; that emerging science is called epigenetics.  Genetic memory is the sum total of both routine inter-cellular genetic processes, as well as the net effect of extra-cellular, epigenetic influences on DNA.  The combined effect of these inner and outer genetic processes leads to what we have inherited from our forebears.