Two ladies were talking together at a genealogical meeting. One woman was a bit of a snob. She said, "My family tree begins with my ancestors who arrived in America on the Mayflower!" The Other woman quickly replied, "Unfortunately we lost all our family records in The Flood!

• Thou shalt name your male children: James, John, Joseph, Richard, Thomas, or William.

• Thou shalt name your female children: Elizabeth, Mary, Martha, Sarah, Virginia, or Mae.

• Thou shalt leave NO trace of your female children.

• Thou shalt, after naming your children from the above lists, never refer to them by those names again; instead, thou shalt call them by strange nicknames such as: Ike, Polly, Dolly, or Sukey.

• Thou shalt not use any middle names on ANY legal documents or census reports; and whenever possible, use only initials on legal documents.

• Thou shalt learn to sign all documents illegibly so that your surname can be spelled, or misspelled in various ways: Tipper, Topper, Hopper, Tucker, Tapper.

• Thou shalt, after no more than three generations, make sure that all family records are lost, misplaced, burned in a court house fire, lost at sea, or buried so that NO future trace of them can be found.

• Thou shalt propagate misleading legends, rumors, and vague innuendo regarding your place of origin:

  	a. You MAY have come from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or Iran.
  	b. You MAY have American Indian ancestry of the ____tribe.
  	c. You MAY have descended from one of the three brothers that came from ____.

• Thou shalt leave no cemetery records, headstones, or headstones with legible names; no will any of the dates thereon match those in public records.

• Thou shalt leave no family bible with records of birth, marriage, or death.

• Thou shalt ALWAYS flip thy name around. If born James Albert, thou must make the rest of thy records in the name of Albert, AJ, JA, AL, Bert, Bart, or Fred.

• Thou must also flip thy parents names around when making reference to them, although "Unknown" is an acceptable alternative.

• Thou shalt name all generations of children with the identical first names, as will all of the brothers so that all cousins are named the same.

There isn't a thing I wouldn't give upon this lovely, glorious earth to find your name and place of birth. To find your parents and siblings too and learn a little bit of you. To find even the smallest trace of your final resting place.

To learn how your lived and how you died. Where did you marry your blushing bride? How did you earn your daily bread? And where did you rest your weary head? Was your life the one of ease, or work 'round the clock? Were you born of nobility or plain peasant stock? Was your life full of joy or deepest heartaches? Was it a life of success or sad mistakes?

These are the questions that plague my brain. Causing sleepless nights and headache pain. These are the questions I must confess, I think of constantly and about which I obsess. 'Cause over twenty tedious years I have spent trying to find out where you went. But for all my hard work, my results are nil, for dear, dead relative you elude me still!

WE ARE THE CHOSEN! There is in each family one who seems to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again, to tell the story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts, but instead, breathing life into all who have gone before.

We are the storytellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before, cry out to us . . . "tell our story". So we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How may graves have we stood before and cried? How many times have we told ancestors "You have a lovely family, you would be proud of us". How may times have we walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love for us?

It goes beyond just documenting facts, it is who we are and why do we so the things we do? It is seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying "We can't let this happen". The bones here are bones of our bones and flesh of our flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It is pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish, and contributed to what we are today. It is respecting their hardships and losses, never giving in or giving up their resolve to build a life for their family.

It is with deep pride that they fought to make and keep us a nation, and understanding that they were doing it for us. So we were born to be as we are, and that we might remember them. So we remember, with love and caring, recording each fact of their existence because they are a part of us.

So, as chosen scribes, we tell the story of our families. It is up to that one called and chosen in the next generation to answer the call and take their place in the long line of family storytellers.

• In order to put the "final touches" on your genealogical research, you've ask all of your closest relatives to provide DNA samples.

• You are the only person to show up at the cemetery research party with a shovel.

• You were instrumental in having the "non genealogical room copy machine" classified as a federal hate crime.

• Your house leans slightly toward the side where your genealogical records are stored.

• You decided to take a two week break from genealogy and the U.S. Postal Office immediately laid off 1,500 employees.

• During an ice storm outage, you ignore the pleas of your shivering spouse and placed your last quilt around that 1886 photograph of dear Uncle George.

• "A Loving Family" and "Financial Security" have moved up to second and third respectively on your list of life's goals, but still lag far behind "Owning My Own Microfilm Reader".

• A magical genie appears and agrees to grant you only one wish and you ask that the 1890 census be restored.

I want ancestors who could read and write, had their children baptized in recognized houses of worship, went to school, purchased land, left detailed wills (naming a huge extended family as legatees), had their photographs taken once a year ...subsequently putting said pictures in elaborate isinglass frames annotated with calligraphic inscriptions, and carved voluble and informative inscriptions in their headstones. I want relatives who managed to bury their predecessors in established, still-extant (and indexed) cemeteries.

I want family members who wrote memoirs, who enlisted in the military as officers and who served in strategically important (and well documented) skirmishes. I want relatives who served as councilmen, schoolteachers, county clerks, and two historians. I want relatives who "religiously" wrote in the family Bible, journaling every little event, and detailing familiar relationship of every visitor.

In the case of immigrant progenitors, I want them to have arrived only in those years wherein passenger lists were indexed by National Archives, and I want them to have applied for citizenship, and to have done so only in those jurisdictions which have since established indices.

I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, who joined every patrimonial society they could find, who kept diaries, and listed all their addresses, who had painting made of their horses, and who dated every piece of paper they touched. I want forbears who were wealthy enough to afford, and to keep for generations, the tribal homestead, and who left all the aforementioned pictures and diaries and journals intact in the library.

But, most of all, I want relatives I can find!!