This morning, I came across some information about my parents that surprised me.
I mentioned it to Selena several times throughout the day. I also checked with my sister to see whether she knew anything about it. She didn’t provide the immediate explanation I was looking for, so the information remained one of those loose threads the mind keeps tugging when it should be occupied with something else.
On Sunday evenings, I have a Zoom call with my children. We began the practice during COVID, when isolation forced families to find new ways of occupying the same room. The restrictions eventually lifted, but our weekly gathering remained.
Tonight, I mentioned what I had discovered to my boys.
One thing led to another, and Selena produced a document I had received some time ago but never read. It was a genealogy written by my father.
I scanned the document, sent copies to my children and began reading.
My father spent seventy-four pages remembering people he had never met.
He traced names through courthouse records, cemetery inscriptions, marriage certificates, land transactions and family stories. He followed generations across states and, when the evidence permitted, across oceans. He constructed an elaborate numbering system in which every digit and letter identified another person’s place on the Burgin family tree.
Some of the people recorded there had been dead for centuries. Yet he searched for their birthplaces, spouses, children, migrations and final resting places. He tried to distinguish documented history from family tradition and left spaces where information had escaped him.
On a page titled “Why Study Genealogy?” he asked:
“Do you want your grandchildren to know who you are? Of course you do, but we forget so easily.”
That sentence may explain the entire project.
My father understood that forgetting happens quietly. A name disappears from conversation. A photograph loses its identification. A story is remembered by one generation, partially repeated by the next and buried with the generation after that.
He was attempting a rescue operation.
The manuscript was eventually typed from his original notes by a coworker named Ginny. He took it to a family reunion, gathered additional information and intended to produce an updated version.
He died before finishing it.
What remained was a working history—imperfect, speculative in places and occasionally contradicted by better evidence. Yet it is still a remarkable record of his curiosity, persistence and desire to preserve something that might otherwise disappear.
But as I moved through the pages, I encountered something I did not expect.
The closer the genealogy came to my father, the thinner and less accurate it became.
The distant branches received names, dates, marriages, children and stories. When the record reached his own family, the information was incomplete or wrong.
The inaccuracies were not hidden among distant branches of the family tree.
My birthday is wrong. My son Jared’s birthday is wrong. My sister’s husband is represented by a blank space before his last name.
These were not ancestors separated from my father by centuries. They were his children, his son-in-law and his grandson. Their information did not need to be excavated from a courthouse basement or deciphered from a weathered headstone.
It only needed to be known.
That is where my surprise began turning into hurt.
Then I reached the bottom of one page and turned to the next.
My father had written that he made several mistakes in his life. The sentence continued across the page break:
“Two of them was getting married and the other one was when his children were growing up. He says, ‘I lost it, but life will go on.’”
Immediately beneath those words appeared the heading:
“Children by George and Kay.”
Then he began listing his children.
I am one of those children.
I do not know precisely what my father meant. I don’t know what he believed he had lost or whether those words adequately expressed what he intended to say.
I only know what it felt like to read them.
The man who carefully recovered the names of distant relatives from obscurity left his own children standing beneath a sentence about regret and loss.
That hurt.
The temptation is to make the manuscript testify against him—to treat every omission as a verdict, every mistake as proof of indifference and that painful sentence as the final explanation of our relationship.
But that would require me to claim knowledge I do not possess.
The manuscript demonstrates that my father cared about family. What remains uncertain is what the word “family” meant to him.
Perhaps he understood family primarily as lineage: a shared name moving through history, connecting one generation to another. Family, in that sense, is ancestry, migration, continuity and inheritance.
But lineage is not the same thing as relationship.
A family tree can tell us who belonged to whom. It cannot tell us whether they were known, heard, encouraged or loved well.
Genealogy is orderly. Living families rarely are.
The dead remain where the records place them. They make no new decisions, raise no objections and offer no competing memories. Their names can be arranged into generations, and the empty spaces between dates can sometimes be filled with an appealing story.
The living are more complicated.
They change. They struggle. They disappoint us and are sometimes disappointed by us. They remember events differently. They need things from us that cannot be satisfied by adding another name to a page.
Perhaps it is possible to love the idea of family while struggling with the demands of relationship.
That possibility would be easy to assign entirely to my father. It would also allow me to avoid a more uncomfortable question:
Do I know the people closest to me as carefully as I know the things that interest me?
I may know the history of a place but not the disappointment one of my children is carrying. I may remember the accomplishments of someone who died a century ago while overlooking the quiet courage of the person sitting across from me. I may preserve photographs, dates and stories for future generations while failing to be fully present with the generation sharing my life today.
Records are important. Stories matter. I am grateful my father cared enough to gather both.
But preserving a family requires more than remembering its past. It requires paying attention to its present.
The most important family history is still being written around our tables, during telephone calls and, sometimes, among a collection of faces arranged across a computer screen every Sunday night.
It is written when we ask another question and remain long enough to hear the answer. It is written when we remember what someone is facing, acknowledge where we have been wrong and choose relationship over the comfort of our own version of events.
My father feared that we forget too easily.
He was right.
But forgetting is not limited to names disappearing from old records. We can also forget to notice the people standing directly in front of us.
His manuscript preserved hundreds of names. It also left a few unexpected spaces, several incorrect details and one sentence I wish I had never needed to read.
I cannot fill those spaces for him, rewrite his words or know with certainty what he intended.
I can, however, decide what those words will produce in me.
I want to honor the people who came before me by remembering their names and preserving their stories. But I also want to honor the people beside me by knowing them accurately, listening to them carefully and loving them while there is still time to do so.
Someday, my name may occupy a line in someone else’s family history.
Until then, I intend to keep showing up on Sunday nights.
I want my children to know that their place in my life is not beneath a sentence about regret. Their names are not merely branches in a genealogy or details to be recorded accurately.
They are among the best parts of my story.
And I want to make certain that the names closest to mine are never the people I know the least.
Seeking a reason for their latency, my exploration took me outside to find my new employees, some seated and some standing, taking a smoke break. I chuckled and went back to the storage area and waited. A couple more minutes produced the first section of seating and sent the brutes off for the second section. I ascended the stairs and found them working on the second section of heavy, metal framed seating. Out they went and down I went to the storage area. When they didn’t arrive after a few minutes I went outside and found them taking another smoke break. I chuckled and waited.
