Three Little Boxes
It all started with three names. This was after the Abbiates had given me the gift of a DNA test for Christmas. I spit into the vial, duly sent it in and discovered that, yes, I’m about as white as a person can be. I am 1% Native American, of which I’m very proud, but that’s about it.
Then, while searching through the Ancestry site, I came upon a family tree. There were three little boxes on that tree and three names inside those boxes: Nancy West, Kenneth West and Robert West. My dad Ken was above me and Robert was right next to Ken where he should have been as his brother. Incredible!
I began, for fun, to put in the rest of the family into their own little boxes. Little did I know where that would lead. Very quickly I noticed little leaves in the upper right corner of the boxes. When I clicked on them, voila! Information about the person in that box magically appeared.
Using the hints from Ancestry and my own fairly advanced research skills, I was able to build a tree that now contains almost 8,000 little boxes. Over the course of many years, a disjointed collection of people, places and events started to take shape. That shape was not just a history our our ancestors but, for better or worse, also a history of the United States.
This blog is my way of collating those stories into a chronological narrative of our ancestors migration across the Atlantic to the eastern shores of a New World. Their subsequent migration took them westward across rivers, mountains and plains, all the way to the shores of the Pacific.
Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies
~ Shirley Abbott