Pulled Through the Knothole of Time

Bill Thomas, John Blevins, Linda, Marsha, Babies Crystal & Me

   I like to get out old picture albums that remind me where I've been.  Sometimes I like to show my teenagers that we actually tucked our shirts in when I was in high school in the 1980's! But sometimes I like to get out the older photos that go back to the very beginning when I was small.  It's starting to be shocking how old they look.  I have an album of photos from my baby and toddler years full of my earliest memories.
  This picture is a snapshot of time gone by in so many ways.  My dad and mother are on either end of the couch; they divorced when I was little.  I am in my aunt Linda's lap.  She and my Uncle John also divorced and she moved away with my cousin Crystal and I never knew my cousin. I wish I could find her some day.  But maybe this photo is an example of the life of families; always changing with the the years.  The photographs capture stationary moments but as we live our lives so many things flow and change, while others, remain steadfastly the same. 
   I think that is what has captured my interest in genealogy.  What is in in families that comes down to us through the ages and remains unchanged?  What is passed on from those people that we've never met but comes to us anyway?  Is it in our genes?  Do they pass it to us by example?   When it comes down to it, it's fairly miraculous that any of us has made it through the incalculable odds of time, place and biology to be here at all.  Yet here we are. That is a fact worth celebrating; and one that fascinates me enough to want to learn more about how my own family managed to be pulled through the knothole of time.