I haven't posted at DU for a while mostly because I've got 1 or 2 hours per day of "my time" and I've been digging into my ancestry a bit, and into the ancestry for a couple of friends of mine, also. But DU, you're not far from my mind. I read the Greatest page just about every day but haven't been in a position to post.

Pick up one thing in the universe and you'll find it's hitched to everything else. I want to share with you where the genealogy has taken me.

I don't care about being connected to some great 'conqueror' in France or even some famous writer. I want to know about the earthen people, the strugglers and endurers, the wretched and desparate ones who refused to give up. I still want my son to know that he's his own unique person, free to shape his own life as he sees fit. But history and culture have lessons for our generation and his.

Simple census records, fleshed out by a bit of history: I follow a strand into a part of Denmark taken over by Germany, where a newly married young couple fled their homeland long disrupted by war, a land where some young men were being drafted to fight in the foreign conqueror's army. I follow another strand to the Irish immigrant farmers -- their former homeland soon to be in the midst of a famine -- who came to a new land and cleared tracts to farm. They lived literally in a community of their brothers, and the farm life was hard but frequently long... Long lives compared to where my searches took me next: Liverpool and Manchester.

To be told in high school history class of the misery experienced in the Industrial Revolution or the labor struggle is one thing; to see its results in the census records just 3 or 4 generations back from your own middle class life is another. A widowed man is living with his three young children in one census, ages 3, 5, and 6; ten years later, I find the 2 girls as domestic servants and the boy as a coalminer, age 16, living in different neighborhoods.

The coalminers die young. This one escaped, and came to America.

I want to tell everyone I know:
Your great-grandfather escaped from the coal mines, but the owners want to march you right back in.
The GOP wants to kill the child labor laws that your grandparents appreciated and to take away the union protections that your great-uncle got beaten trying to obtain.
The "free-trade" fairytale concludes with somebody's children slaving away on plantations or in sweatshops.
Your freedom to speak up or to help shape your government will all but end when a twist of fate lands you in the middle of a famine or an economic collapse or working dawn to dusk in a textile mill as cheap labor.
Let's not even mention the part about your ancestors escaping the tyranny of a king.

Don't be deceived by silver tongued storytellers trying to persuade you to trade up. These gifts from your forebears -- the strugglers and endurers, the wretched and desparate ones -- were hard-won.