My innate pride of our family and my desire to know and preserve our ancestry have inspired me to initiate the searching out of our long forgotten past and discover the memories that might have been lost forever.

Family history, I believe, does not begin in the past. It begins with a questioning of our own personal identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? How did I get to be as I am? Where am I headed? These are the questions that would lead us into our quest for identity.

To understand ourselves today, we need a vision of our past. We have to find out who our ancestors were. Our talents and abilities are the fruit of generations of ancestors, whose very characteristics, by environment or heredity, have given meaning and directions to our lives.

Our family history is the one unifying thread that runs through our lives. If all else seems to be in a flux, our family heritage remains the same. No matter what we do in life, our family history belongs uniquely to us. It makes us a part of a tradition that goes beyond us and our own time. We can ignore our roots, or even renounce them, but we can never change or destroy them.