I Want I want ancestors with names like Rudy Montagnard or Mechiznick Von Steuben or Spetznatz Giafortoni, not Mary Smith or William Johnson. I want ancestors who went to school, could read and write, 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 acid free albums with names, dates, and places. I want relatives who managed to bury their predecessors in established, still-extant (and indexed) cemeteries, with carved voluble and informative inscriptions on their headstones. I want family members who wrote memoirs, kept diaries, enlisted in the military, particularly officers who served in strategically important (and well documented) skirmishes. I want relatives who served as Congressional members, judges, councilmen, school teachers, county clerks, police officers, firefighters. I want relatives who had their children baptized in recognized houses of worship, "religiously" wrote in the family Bible, recording every little event and detailing the familial relationship of every visitor. I want immigrant progenitors to have arrived only in those years wherein passenger lists were indexed by the National Archives, to have applied for citizenship in those jurisdictions which have since established indices. I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, joined every patrimonial society, kept journals, listed all their addresses, dated every piece of paper they touched and had paintings made of their houses. I want forebears who were wealthy enough to afford, and keep for generations, the tribal homestead and left all the aforementioned pictures, diaries and journals in the library. But most of all I want relatives I can FIND! ------------------------- Source: The Parkhurst Family Journal - Vol. 5, No. 1, Mar, 1999 - used by permission. With this short article, I wish to each and every one of you a blessed Holiday Season. Tim Stowell