Previously, I posted about an article deriding the subject of genealogical research. I took issue with the few points presented in the article, but it did get me thinking again about my own motivations to research my family tree. These sayings usually come to mind:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Shelley's poem notes that monuments don't last to tell your story; Franklin, however, alludes to the fact that one's progeny can tell your story--provided that the written testament is interesting enough to persist over time.
I'm interested in providing that written testament of my family. As far as I know, there are no famous or infamous individuals in my family tree: I don't need there to be in order to find my ancestors interesting. How did my Hohlt, Bott, and Drollinger relatives experience life under the tyrants of Prussia and 1800s Germany? What sort of fear and despair did Carl and Hermann Hohlt--then 16 and 14, respectively--feel when sailing to the United States, alone, to live with strangers because their family could no longer provide for them? (Carl got off the train at Indianapolis and waved goodbye to his brother who would travel to a family "out west." Carl never saw his brother again.) How did the "Bott" surname become "Butt" and later "Butts"? My Grandfather Butts always theorized that it was probably due to bad penmanship--for all the school-time laughter and ridicule, bad handwriting be damned!!!
Anyway, it is to these and others in my family tree that I would like to give voice. And, perhaps by giving them voice, I will have secured my voice in history for at least a little while after I'm gone.