Life is beauty.
But everything has it's origins, and life is no exception.
I am no exception. Thus the question that will haunt me more than anything else as I take my turn to occupy a space on earth is
who were those that made me possible? We just learned exponential functions in math, so let me be a little nerdy here. To find the number of ancestors for x number of generations ago, f(x)=2
x . Approximating that there's 25 years per generation, then in just 250 years of just 10 generations you have 1024 ancestors. 1024! As the numbers increase, it becomes obvious that ancestors are shared because eventually the potential number of ancestors exceeds the population of the planet at that time. I highly recommend reading more on this and how we're all descended from Nefertiti
here.
So ditch the technical stuff now. These people were not just numbers, but living breathing souls who had names, who experienced life into maturity with moments of laughter, moments of tears. Were they quick & witty or lion-hearted, were they lowly slaves or kings & queens? Every single one of them traces back to the dawn of humanity, first through Noah {btw, Robert Ballard may have found actual evidence of the Flood,
here!} but then back to Adam.
Although I'm not sure exactly how accurate this is, according to my grandparents I am related to Hans Christian Andersen as well as George Washington, both not directly but through their brothers or something. My mom's maiden name is Bohr, as her step-dad {so not true blood, but still}, was a direct descendent of the famous chemist Neils Bohr. My cousins are direct descendents of Hyrum Smith, the brother of Joseph Smith, which through the lineage of the Howard family makes them related to Emma Hale, George W. Bush, George W. H. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. {I'm not lying! Look up pictures of the John Howland family tree for proof.} I know in actuality I am greatly Danish, because the Lundgreens crossed the Atlantic and then the Great Plains in the 1800's to find religious freedom with the other LDS people in Utah. One person was even the thirty-somethingth member of the church. On my mom's father's side, the French Girouards came to Quebec in the 1700's. One who did not travel to the Americas suffered the fate of beheading at the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. My oblong facial structure is proof of my being 1/32 Native American; my great-great grandmother was a Creek Indian actually born on the Trail of Tears! Intermingled in my DNA is also Scandinavian Viking, Irish, Scottish, and English.
My name Katherine originated from the Greek word for "pure," while Elizabeth is the Hebrew "promise." Obviously my parents weren't choosing my name for my ancestry {my mom had it picked out at 18} but really, could I have any Greek blood, any Hebrew? For that matter, ancestry goes back far enough why not Ethiopian, Indian, or Chinese? Do I read in the history books about world heroes or villains who's children's children's children's child happens to be me?
I just wish I could know. Go back a few short generations and I already can't remember names, much less their amazing stories or little quirks that made them who they were. And this is unfair on my part, because I owe them my life.
This is why perhaps I write my story and strive to make the best of it. After I have children and my clock has ticked it's last minute, after 250 years when I have become one of 1024 ancestors forgotten in a distant past, maybe God can grant the kindness of allowing my book to be dug back up so that my memory can live on, not forgotten.
