41. We go waaaaaay back.

I did a massive cleaning of my side of the room this past week, the sort of cleaning that turns up objects that have gone missing for years (among some of the items I found: a gift card for Guitar Center, a book I meant to read about 8 months ago, the Beach Boys' "lost" album SMILE, and Jimmy Hoffa).

I also thumbed through several notepads I'd held on to (as we've already established, I'm a bit of a packrat, and notepads are ripe with juicy, mundane details about everyday life). One of the notepads contained a pretty cool page I'd almost forgotten about.

It's a handwritten list of names copied from a website that has since inexplicably disappeared from the internet. The website was an extensive genealogy of the Cloud* family (my mom's family) in America; the page I'd hand-copied from the site was a generation-by-generation accounting of my own ancestors, dating back to 1502.

I mourn the disappearance of the website from whence this list came, but I'm very glad to have rediscovered this page in my notebook. I've always been a bit fascinated with genealogy--whether my own or others'--as it provides a very humanizing and personalizing element to the cold, hard facts of history; a clear picture of how close we are to events we consider to be in the ancient past.

In my case, I've come to find that I'm only five generations removed--meaning my mom's grandfather's grandfather--from Nathaniel Cloud, Jr., who fought for the Union Army in the Civil War; his grandfather, very likely, fought in the Revolutionary War. You only need to go several generations further (a total of 11 from me) to find William Cloud arriving in America with William Penn, sometime around 1660.

(1660...that's nearly 350 years ago. Kinda blew my mind when I first saw that. It still kinda does.)

I don't think there'll be any trouble keeping accurate and detailed records of genealogy from this day and age on. If anything, our descendants will have too much information about us. ("Whoa...did you know Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Dave once enjoyed something called 'Guitar Hero'? He mentioned it on his blog once." "Guitar Hero? Blog? What are those things?" "Uhh...I have no idea. Probably something necessary for his survival in such a primitive society.")

But it's a pretty cool thing to currently be able to trace my family tree back several hundred years--considering the incomplete and often scarce records from the 19th century on down.

Not everyone can say that. (Not that anyone is particularly dying to say that.)



*Truth be told, I've often toyed with the idea of using "Cloud" as my last name in a pseudonym, swapping it in for my weird, oft-mispronounced/misspelled Swedish last name.