Yes, I'm definitely thankful. My earliest gratitude was in learning the context of people's lives whose stories I already knew or had known in person. New research pointed out the endurance, struggles and joys behind those familiar stories and explained the who of each, the primary reason I became interested in genealogy.
What I didn't expect, and now am equally grateful for, is from the opposite end, of people I'd never met or heard, people who were lucky and not, faced times different from ours, distinguished themselves or didn't, but grew quite familiar over time. The facts of history and their times sometimes allowed me to understand stories that weren't told or passed down, but still was my family, my people.
One was of a relative who whose life was much like that of my family. We frequented the same general area, had summer vacations in the same activity or place, alike in family ties and aspirations. He is the one who opened this new perspective for me. He went to college in my town, wrote poems to a woman who became his wife, had children and became a successful lawyer highly respected in his hometown. And yet, his life ended in a shocking way.
I could see how it happened from the facts, could almost hear, as if I were there. I wept sitting at the computer because suddenly he had become real to me, from facts to skin, bones, thoughts and decisions—in precisely the same way my family stories had done. So I am grateful and humbled for the growing relationships that this study has allowed me. For what genealogy has and is teaching me, that the threads that make us and tie us stretch in every direction in time, and that life is, as always, a gift.
