Tree of Life Gustav Klimt
Perhaps it was because I had no roots at all, I took to
playing keenly and too well the generation game;
making myself at home in others’ times,
playing the extra’s part in others’ live-in history.
Chasing the dead, feeling joy but also others’ pain,
treading with care when walking in another’s shoes,
spying on the secrets and the sorrows from their past.
Detection is not easy but persistence pays me well
through the many hours of boredom, sweat and toil
but finding folk is like a fever breaking.
Consanguinity, linking life to life,
creating a wider, ever-spreading family tree,
beginning with paternity and maternity,
growing a tree of linkage, lineage and heredity,
attaining a sense of place,
gaining an identity.
Cait O’Connor
Cait, please forgive me if I have taken your topic, and have made it swerve towards my take on that topic.
ReplyDeleteAs a child, I was gradually, gradually given the notion of various traditional ties that might actually connect to my family. Some of these connections were eventually given some sort of researchable (is that actually a word) anchor.
And then decades went past, and I passed through early adulthood, and into the challenges of midlife, and beyond.
Now. I am setting into official (discounts available) senior citizen territory, and find that all that prior research done by my dad, and honored by some of my generation, really just does not have too much meaning to me. Perhaps this is because I have no children of my own. Perhaps.
If I were able to give some sort of life to the various charts that have been compiled, it might give those charts more meaning to me.
I cannot do it! I know that I have lots of past relatives who lived in Virginia, and might conjecture that some of these early Virginians might just have arrived from across the pond.
Meanwhile, for now, I want to see what I might still be able to do and see and experience in my own lifetime.
Yes, I wish that my family's researchers might have come up with something with which I could connect, but...alas. Don't think so.
xo
Beautiful; thank you.
ReplyDeleteI love the tree of life. When I udes to make and exchange fabric postcards, we had a Klimt theme and the tree was the one I made. How I wish I had made 2 and kept one for myself.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful the tree of life Cait, I only discovered a few weeks ago that I had an Aunt in America, sadly not alive anymore. I came across a newspaper cutting from some of my late father's belongins.
ReplyDeleteCait, I relate to so much Frances shared and your own tree of life.
ReplyDeleteI was born at my grandmother's - my mother a teenager. Through the years so different then anyone else in family I was often told
"if you had not been born at home I would believe you were not my child." Have done some charts for my children and grandchildren just so they know of past relatives. Felt it was my duty being the mother of 4 children. But much has no meaning - except - my grandmother who encouraged and loved me the most was such a strong woman. A widow at 34 with 6 children - do not know how she survived. So I see her strength and courage in me as I think of all that has happened in my life.
Your sharing is meaningful to me...