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| Llewellyn Harris |
We are the chosen.
In each family there is one who seems called to find the
ancestors.
To put flesh on their bones and make them live again.
To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and
approve.
Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead,
breathing life into all who have gone before.
We are the story tellers of the tribe.
All tribes have one.
We have been called, as it were, by our genes.
Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we
do.
In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.
How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost
count.
How many times have I told the ancestors, "You have a
wonderful family; you would be proud of us."
How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow
there was love there for me? I cannot say.
It goes beyond just documenting facts.
It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do.
It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds
and indifference and saying - I can't let this happen.
The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
It goes to doing something about it.
It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish.
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Llewellyn Harris letter
to children and grandchildren |
How they contributed to what we are today.
It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never
giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their
family.
It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to
make and keep us a nation.
It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing
it for us.
It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give
us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back
as we can reach.
That we might be born who we are.
That we might remember them.
So we do.
With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence,
because we are they and they are the sum of who we are.
So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family.
It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the
call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers.
That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls
those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had
never known before.
- By: Della M. Cummings
Wright
- Rewritten by her granddaughter: Della JoAnn McGinnis Johnson
- Edited and
Reworded by: Tom Dunn, 1943.
This is where I found the poem:
The man in the photo is my 3rd great grandfather, Llewellyn Harris; and the letter he wrote on August 15, 1903 to his children and grandchildren about their ancestors.
