Rene.Style

History: we all have one.  Our relatives and ancestors before us are the reason we are here today.  Passed down from generation to generation many of our customs and traditions of today came from our ancestors.  The foods and stories are just some of the traditions of my family.  With Easter here and my parents as a captive audience we have embarked upon our own history with a membership to ancestry.com to try to retrace a part of our roots.  The people before us that we have heard numerous stories about, but without much fact on who they were and where they came from.  The great aunts, uncles and great grandparents who have taken on their own persona in the stories told by my parents.  The fabric of our lives is woven with the lives of many individuals who share a common history, they are our family. We are finding out lots of information, most of it a bit different from the stories I have been told one being the background of my maternal grandfather.  While I was under the belief he was Polish like his wife, my grandmother I have learned he was Russian and as a little boy had emigrated from Russia sometime in the late 1800’s.  My daughters find this fascinating as they see their lineage change and realize they are even more ‘mutt’ than they had previously believed.  Unfortunately, the translation of names from foreign languages is not a fool-proof method and some relatives have been ‘lost’ since no one now knows their ‘real’ name, but the emerging family tree is already 100 people strong and we still have far to go in the search for our roots.  So as we celebrate Easter with our traditions, it is nice to spend time as a family making new traditions while looking into our past to those people who made many of the old ones.