To start things off, I'm a homosexual who was growing up in an extreme southern family.(Sidenote; I have beat around the bush with this for a long time. My family is anything but supportive about this, even after all these years, but it's time to just be honest with myself and accept that I'm gay and that some people won't accept it.) Throw in some teen angst and the death of my grandmother, and I was a kid overflowing with powerful feelings toward my family. I wanted nothing more than to leave and never look back.
And then I did. When I turned 18, I packed up my entire room and threw everything into my van. I kissed my Mom goodbye and went and lived with some friends that I worked with. Over the years, I've moved around a lot. I've gone back to live at my Mom's only once, and it was brief. I drifted to different jobs, different personalities, and different parts of the city of Jacksonville.
Getting away from my family has made my "heart grow fonder." I started college and began doing something with my life. I stopped blaming my family for my problems. I wanted to become a prominent member in my family. I wanted my family to know that I love each and every person in our family tree, despite their short comings. So I started to show up more often at family events. I'm still struggling with communicating with some family members, but I want to reach out to them and just let them know that I really care about them, regardless of whatever happened in the past.
I've always had a fascination with gossip. I remember being younger, and begging cousins to tell me their secrets. This blossomed, with the help of the radio program This American Life, into a healthy appetite for stories. Now, here I am, on the verge of turning 22, with a lot of free time after obtaining my A.A degree. I've decided to use this time to begin working on my family's genealogy. But, besides doing research, I want to conduct interviews with my family and collect their stories and memories so that I can have a better understanding about the people that I call family.
One of the hardest things to deal with at this point is that I've already lost so much. My great grandparents are all gone, and they took all of their memories and insight with them, and I can't get that back. Some questions that I crave the answers to could only really be answered by them, and now I'll never know for sure. I regret not listening to every story they had, or telling them just one more time that I loved them.
I'm not just doing this for myself. I want to do this for everyone in my family. I hope to go as far back as I can, and broaden my search to include my extended family. I hope that this will hold some importance to my descendants. I want my great-grandchildren to know more than just the dates on my tombstone; I want them to know about the life I led, the people I loved, the events that shaped me to be who I am, and everything else that the dash between 1990 and 20?? represents.
