I love puzzles. Most puzzles, that is. I am not especially fond of a 10,000 piece puzzle where most everything is blue: blue water and blue sky without much of anything else. I don't really even mind the complicated ones that have a bunch of detail because there is a place that they obviously have to go.
I'm climbing my family tree these days. I started looking because of my daughter and it became a near-obsession for me. (I only say near out of vanity. It really is an obsession!) I've found that certain parts of my family tree are like the blue water/blue sky puzzles. I can't find diddly squat. Other branches, however are like getting a nice picture and the voila! These two parts fit together. They just had to, after all!
Some of the clues come from things that I'm learned throughout my life - like the oddness that some members of my family ended up with the same last name as relatives a few generations back. That helped find some folks. And it's alway really lucky to find likeminded family members who have compiled the tree, too. I had a breakthrough from this luck today.
My daughter has long since lost interest in my quest. She was excited to find that Harry Houdini* was Hungarian like we are (as I am one-quarter.) But mostly, the search is interesting to me and she may find that it interests her too when she gets to be my age. We'll see.
*I am not related to Harry Houdini. Nor am I related to Sandy Koufax, as I told people for years after mistakenly remembering a conversation where I learned instead we may be related to Ernie Kovacs.
No comments:
Post a Comment