On Sunday, Pam Schwartz held a zoom meeting with a former museum colleague whose family history she had researched. When Pam begins researching a person’s genealogy she works incredibly fast scouring though millions of online resources to look deep into the family’s past.
Many evenings we sit together on the couch and work on each of our family trees. Back in the 1990s I started researching my tree using the New York public library in New York City to find links to the past. Pam introduced me to online research and I re-worked my research entirely using online documents to verify each fact found. It is possible to find the smallest details of a persons life at the touch of a button.
I lost two relatives recently and their loss renewed a need to piece together moments from their lives. I feel like that is an artists propose to document personal history through sketches and paintings. It is rewarding each time I find that a distant relative left behind a paper trail that has hints about what their life must have been like. Very often they are stories of human resilience and perseverance all of which offer lessons for life today.