FAMILY HISTORY
by Janet Kres
From August 1989 East Texas Mensa SpectruM

I was explaining to my husband recently the benefits of being married to a genealogist - "Look, when you're out of town, you don't have to wonder if I'm down at the honky-tonk. You know I'm in the library, looking up census records on dead people."

He gets a glazed look in his eye when the talk turns to genealogy. I think he's taking a mental trip to a quiet place where he can compute the Rangers' standing in the Western division. The rest of the family accepts my hobby with be mused tolerance.. On occasion they're glad to have access to these records, but most of the time they'd rather not talk about it. "Do you really think that's interesting?" they ask. Well, does a cat have fur?

Of course it's interesting! These are the people who shaped the world we live in today. (And if it weren't for these people, you wouldn't be here today.) Think of the choices they had to make - "Do I go to America or not?" "Do I fight for the revolution or not?" (Two of my ancestors opted to be Loyalists - and were hung from the town's lamp posts. Cleared the monarchist traits out of the gene pool.) "Do I go west or stay here?" This is what history is all about - people and the choices they made.

What choice would we make if someone came up to us and said, "We're getting up a spaceship to Mars.. It's a three month trip, and we're not real sure what'll be there when we arrive. But it's a chance at a lot of free land in a new country. Want to go?"

Hey, does a cat have fur?