English practice 55

Finding My Family Tree

As a boy, I was fortunate to have a close family, all living in the same town. I saw my grandparents often, and they'd tell me story after story of a past world and of the people . I strolled through a thicket with my grandfather, picking up leaves and sticks along the way. Sometimes I knew from which tree they had fallen, but my grandpa happily gave me hints for most of them. 48 Bit by bit, he told me a story about from where he and his family had come and the acres of woods he had explored as a boy.

My grandfather's immediate family came from Quebec; . He always wanted to take me to his hometown Montreal, but we hadn't yet had the opportunity. The woods in French Canada, he said, were hardy and the trees were the regrowth from widespread logging over a century ago. Quebec has a lot of maples, too, and Grandpa explained how his mother knew how to boil the sap just slowly enough to make syrup.

It amazes me how I've never seen the same shoebox emerge twice from the attic; his family records are astounding. In the dusty box were old sepia photographs of family members My great-grandmother was pictured dough in the kitchen. were splitting on a photograph of boys skating on a pond, hockey sticks raised in celebration of a goal. As the pictures emerged, I felt the emotion captured by these images, and I got the nagging feeling that I would never know these people from my family's past. After that day, I often joined my grandpa to learn about my French-Canadian ancestry, so that, when he is gone, I will be the custodian of the stories.

The culmination of our time together was a detailed family tree, its base formed by first arrived on this continent. Our search for information uncovered amazing historical documents, ships' manifests and handwritten marriage certificates. we'd find more than just a name. Dates recognizing births and deaths were fairly easy to find; occupations and bits of ancestors' life stories became to uncover as we dug deeper into the past. Now, though, we're preserving this history so that our progeny may learn from these stories and take comfort in knowing that, though life may end,