Ancestry

My great grandmother had three daughters. The oldest is my grandmother, Ginny, who had two daughters and one son. The second one is my great aunt, Mary Lou, who has no children. These two sisters live near one another about an hour from me in Pennsylvania. The third is my great aunt, Tobi, who also has no children, and lives in Florida. My great grandmother's brother had one daughter, Jean, cousin to my Gram and her two sisters. She lives in Philadelphia.

Yesterday, all of these people gathered: Ginny, Mary Lou, Tobi, Jean, my mom, her sister, me and my sister. All the known living female relatives in a line begun by my great great grandmother, Pearl. I have rarely felt the sense of kinship I felt with all these women, my blood relations who all hail from a strong, independent Southern woman who steered her own family through trying times and bequeathed that fortitude to all of us. While we were together, we had the chance to watch some old home movies that my grandmother had saved on film reels and had made into a VHS tape. The videos were the kind I didn't think actually existed. Grainy black and white shots skipping from a quick scene of my great grandmother walking out the front door in her fur-collared coat to a shot of her two daughters walking toward the camera in Easter dresses and hats and then to a sky-skimming shot of my grandmother sporting a 40's bob and flashing a grin at the camera. The films are silent, making the emotion all the more raw and freeing the imagination to fill in the gaps and create whole stories out of single images. A doll house, a long brick wall, a trio of children kneeling in the grass... These videos are my family. They are my history.

As I reflected on the people whose genes I have inherited, the people of my mother's mother's mother's family, I realized how many other lives have shaped mine. There is my mother's mother's father's side. Then there's my grandfather's family - the Scottish Boyds. And that's only the ancestry on my mom's side. My father's family is another whole world of names, stories, histories, and homes.

All of these people have made me possible. I am a little link in a big web of people spanning the decades, the ocean, and the continent. This could make me feel less important - merely a product of years of genetic mixing, the result of a bunch of fruitful families, and just another name on the family tree that my great-grandchildren will someday pencil in. But I don't feel unimportant. I feel, instead, the significance of my life. Not that I'm so great, but that I AM at all. The cocktail that makes me me could only have been arranged by the centuries of ancestors who came before, the choices they made of a spouse, of when to have children, of where to live, and of the values to pass along. I am not me by chance; I am me because of the great Orchestrator who guided lives for years in order to assure my existence. I am me because He designed the life circumstances of my ancestors to be just right for His plans. And He is designing my life not only for my own good, but also for the benefit of my descendants.

I am thankful to my ancestors for their lives and for the hand they had in bringing me about. But more than that, I am amazed at the way God has woven together a tight web of people for His purposes and I am aware of my own role in that weaving. May I live in such a way as to be a good ancestor, a woman my descendants will be proud to have come from, a person who lives by the orchestration of God's hand.