Family

My great-grandmother with her family in Mandal, Norway circa 1894. She's the baby. All of the children eventually immigrated to America.

As a lifelong lover of history, family has always been important to me. Learning where my family came from and what their lives were like has always fascinated me. A distant cousin once published a history of our family - in Norwegian - and I pored over the charts, names and dates until the cover fell off. My family is my North Star. No matter what my life in the real world is like at any given moment, the stability and predictability of holidays and gatherings with my extended family grounds me.

 One of the reasons I am such a believer in marriage over co-habitation is because of the recognition of the new husband or wife's joining into the extended family unit. Jack was my partner for years before we exchanged wedding vows. On that day, he became not only my lover but my family. Many lives seem to revolve around a central theme - the engineer whose biography is rife with an appreciation for science at an early age, the cellist who sought out music wherever her travels took her.

 The central theme of my life is my family - the intense bond my cousin TechnoBunny and I shared throughout my childhood, the sense of humor and categorization of the world Shakira and I developed throughout many many hours together in our 20s, the way motherhood has drawn me closer to my own mother than ever before.

 Shakira refers to me as the family historian because I can rattle off the names of cousins, their relation to us, where they live and who they're married to without so much as a pause. It's always fascinated me to trace the path of a single ancestor's descendants and to see how far the branches have spread. I hope this blog entry doesn't read like one long advertisement for ancestry.com (though I do love that site.) I just figured it was time that I put what is perhaps my life's greatest passion into words.

Me with some of my first, second, and third cousins and their spouses and offspring this summer at Lake Sebago in Maine. The cousins are all descendants of Bertha, Tonetta, Olava and Tobine - the four sisters pictured up top. I'm in the beach hat and TechnoBunny is next to me in the sunglasses and blue shirt.