H. is for Hart and I was raised with the family tradition that we were descended from John Hart, signer of the Declaration of Independence. I never asked for proof as I assumed that a tradition like that would never be forgotten. So it came as a shock to me in 1992, at age 62, when I heard that Aunt Ceil had her doubts. Lucile Nevison Philippi , of Alliance, Ohio, my mother's next to youngest sister, produced a Nevison book in the late 1980's and a Hart book in the early 1990's. Aunt Norma, the youngest of the seven sisters, sponsored a Nevison Reunion near Alliance, Ohio, in September 1992. My wife and I attended and I learned the source of Aunt Ceil's doubt of the John Hart connection. She had bought a book, "John Hart; The Biography of a Signer of the Declaration of Independance," The Pioneer Press, Newfane, Vermont, 1977, and the author,Cleon H. Hammond, noted that there were Pennsylvania Hart families which claimed descent but which were not so descended. Aunt Ceil figured that ours was probably one of them. The day after the Reunion, Glennis and I drove our rented car to Pennsylvania. Aunt Ceil has given us the address of her cousin Evelyn Hart McClearn in Stoneboro. Neither Evelyn nor her daughter, who also dropped in, had heard of the John Hart tradition. (They had heard that we were descended from Sir Frances Drake, but that is another story.) With two strikes against the tradition, I took the John Hart biography back to Honolulu and read it. I t contained many lists of descendants. It told how everyone was named for someone in the family. I tablulated their first names and compared them with the first names of our Harts, as contained in Aunt Ceil's Hart book. The intersection of the two sets of names was hard to find. Strike three! If that wasn't enough, James Hart, whom Aunt Ceil named as our earliest known ancestor, was of such an age that, if descended, he would have had to be a grandson of the signer. The grandchildren appeared to be well known and there was no James among them. That was my introduction to genealogy. It was tough to take; I had thrived on this tradition. But abandoning cherished myths is part of growing up. In the years since I have identified my real direct ancestors, all 134 of them. I hope that my descendants will have more satisfaction in knowing the real ones than I did in knowing the pretended one. Rock