62. I got impatient.

I went along for some three decades, from 1977 to 2008, learning what I could about family history, being patient and trying to collect and analyze and put together seemingly trivial humble facts, being content with discoveries that certainly did build upon each other but didn't make a complete whole.    Every new little fact or idea was gratifying, and I was thrilled with all of them, as I tried to put the puzzle together in the early stages, being amazed at every new thing, especially with regard to the social side of the venture.  

Although I like the genealogy side of this pastime, more than that I love the adventures that accompany the discovery of family history, which is different from genealogy.   While genealogy is the science, family history is the art.   

All of a sudden, after about thirty years of this, I got impatient.   For ~31 years I had been working and still had not discovered what I was looking for.  Not that I knew what I was looking for, but I hadn't found it.    Most family historians have this problem.

Perhaps significantly, my age advanced a digit.   I turned 60 years of age.   There is something about 60 that gets your attention, as if one realizes he/she must accelerate his/her activities and wrap up those ambitious life goals pretty quick, while acknowledging rather acutely that ambition, not to mention the minutes allotted to one's life, is fleeting, as are energy and enthusiasm.    Genealogists know this better than most people, though in my opinion most genealogists wait too long in their lives to do their jobs.   When I looked back at my 31 years, I knew that I had begun working not one minute too soon, in 1977, with the interview of Aunt Anna, and for years before that, questioning my father and mother.

One year, not long before her death, my dear cousin Marjorie had asked me, "Well, WHEN are we going to see the results of what you have been doing all these years?"   It was a very good question and I was asking it myself.

The fact was, the study was not yet RIPE.   It was that ripeness and maturity I was seeking.   The simple reality of it was that it was too soon to wrap it up.  And I was clearly running out of time to do it.

What did I still expect to find?   I wanted to get some sense of the person, the people, who had died long before I was born.   I wanted to know, where did they live?   What were their environments?    What did they know?   What did they think about?   What did they do all day long?  How did they live?    Besides simply knowing their occupations, I wanted to know how did their occupations impact the family?   You may think, that's ridiculous and impossible, and you would be right.  On a scale of 1 to 10, the impossibility factor was greater than 11.

Especially Friedrich Treuthardt had been frustrating me with his shyness and avoidance of me, and his stubbornness to be not found by me.   I mean his essence, the invisible, intangible being (as opposed to spirit, which is totally different), which I felt so certain was waiting there to be discovered, though he had been dead since 1907.   After 100 years, the evidence gets skimpier and harder to find.   Maybe it was the 100 year mark that challenged me.    The harder I tried to find it, the more it eluded me.

By now, I had learned that many miracles happen in this venture of family history.   Nothing was too impossible.  Besides, in my childhood, remember, I had watched and read "Heidi" and had gotten something exalted from that, which encouraged me now and provided me another angle.   What I would do is to ask, seek and knock -- in Switzerland.