The Pruning Shears

A few months ago, my father decided to find his ancestry, to build the family tree. At best of time, this endeavor would be fastidious and time consuming. In his case, the challenge is exponentially increased by the fact that my father was not only a bastard child who was later on adopted by his mother’s husband, but also by the mere fact that all but my father have already passed away, leaving very little information to start with. Fortunately, my father is very meticulous if not very patient.

Last week, my father called. He was thrilled by the progress of his work. He had managed to retrace both his biological and adopted father and their families, along with his mother, grandmother and so on all the way back to the native land.

Several had somewhat interesting deaths for lack of interesting lives. Most had married young, had large families. Many women had died in labor, many men at war. Poverty was everywhere. As my father pointed out, life was very hard back then.

All that was left for him to do was to put all the information he had gathered neatly on paper. He explained that starting with himself; he had built the tree by pairs of ancestors along with their children. As soon as the task would be completed, he would send me a copy. I could even, he had said, add my own name to it, if I wanted to…