Today I am thanking my ancestors…all of them… for choices they made and actions they took that lead to me being here now.

I have always known some details about my family history at least as far back as their arrival in the US from Europe in the late 19th Century.  My mother’s side of the family is quite large since her grandparents, the emigres, had eight children.  Thus her father, my Grandfather had lots of siblings and that meant my mom had lots of cousins.  Most of these she was not close to, first geographically and because of that socially.  No Facebook then.  My little branch of the family kept close to only a handfull, mainly the children of my mother’s immediate siblings.  In the past few months I have had the good fortune to come into contact with a cousin I had not known or known of.  His grandfather was one of my grandfather’s brothers, and thus was my mother’s uncle.  Sorry for having taken so long to lay the background, but the point is that my cousin has taken a lot ot time and effort to document the family tree, and because of that I know the unions of four couples has generated a family of over 1100 people.  1100 lives!

Even the wisest of us cannot see all ends.  Decisions we make or actions we take today will affect hundreds if not thousands of our descendants years and longer into the future.  Unseen and unknown to us and possibly each other, the course they set out upon will be influenced by what we do today.  When they look back, will we be thanked?