The Heritage

So this is my Great-Great Grandma Gilbert, pictured with her husband, Joseph McGregor.

I know, she's not much to look at. This sturdy pioneer woman helped raise my grandfather after his father was killed in an accident saving his children's lives. She died from an accidental self-induced carbolic acid poisoning. And she is descended from kings all the way back to the tenth century.

As you can tell, I've been doing some genealogy research. My Dad started it on ancestry.com, and I've been researching some of the fascinating characters that grace the pages of my family tree.

Some of my relations include Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth century poet, who is a great aunt of sorts on both sides of my paternal grandparents. I suppose that isn't too surprising, considering the level of interest in writing in my family. Maybe it's my all-too-overactive imagination, but I can see my sister Kathy's face in her portrait, and I can hear my Grandma's provoking rhyme in her wandering, thoughtful poetry.

Others, such as the Cables of Cade's Cove, and Christopher Martin, whose name appears with 40 others on the Mayflower Compact, have left their mark on history. My Scottish ancestors heralded from the McGregor, McDonald and Robertson clans during the middle ages, and I have many many ancestors from the Netherlands back into the 1500's.

It's been Grandma Georgianna Gilbert's pedigree that has been the most surprising and interesting. Through the Gilbert family, I found myself back in fourteenth century England, during the reign of King Henry VIII, visiting castles and palaces, rubbing arms with royalty, walking the halls of Cambridge and Oxford with my British ancestors. I found that the Holland family, some of my relatives during this time period, are quite possibly descended to the Plantagenet line of English kings, and I was able to trace those through historical records through Norman and Viking kings all the way back to a "Fulk, King of Jerusalem" in the tenth century. I am not so proud of his crusading exploits, or his title "Fulk, the Rude," but I am fascinated that this body that sits here this night in 2009 has a connection to such a past. The distant, unreachable, unfathomable past so many grandmothers and grandfathers ago... and yet there is a link.

Also through the Gilberts I found some more commendable fathers. A brother to my own great-times-a-few grandfather was Sir Henry Adams, who left a legacy of service and charity and also a "stone" of some sort that killed him and is now kept at a laboratory somewhere inside Cambridge University. His effigy is pictured here.

My extremely distant relative through the Benedict family of Nottinghamshire and Norfolk, was Benedict, brother of King Canute IV of Denmark in the mid-eleventh century. He apparently gave his life along with his brother as a martyr, and so his family named lived on through the centuries.

I realize that many people are descended from interesting historical figures. The further back history takes us on the path of our relatives, the more related we all become. But I am completely intrigued by history to the point of obsession, and to have some sort of link with the dark pages of the past - to me - is not unlike uncovering a treasure that has been buried away for years.

There's a place that the Spirit always seems to redirect me when I am lost in the ocean of people and places from history. Though these people handed down their DNA in some form to combine with others and eventually form the person I am, it is the spiritual link that is more sure, more tangible, and more unbending and unquestionable than even my own family tree. Jesus came. Jesus did an amazing thing at Calvary and then burst from a sealed tomb to change the world. His Spirit left turned the hearts of fearful, fleeing disciples into strong hearted apostles that set their faces toward the far corners of the world and went with a joyful message of love and peace. Their legacy, though tried by crosses, by fire, by beheadings, by tortures, by ridicule and false doctrine and every sort of attempt by darkness to uproot it and leave it lost in the hidden corners of history's documentations... their legacy only grew stronger. The fires of trial and persecution only refined that strength into a deeper and more unrelenting passion that lives on today. And that fire lives on in me.

The fire that joined my heart to Christ's 26 years ago is my true lineage, my most amazing connection to history. And I have no shame to be called a child of God, though I can find reasons to be ashamed of my ancestors. So I will not boast in kings and princes that ruled earthly realms, but instead I will boast in my Savior Jesus Christ.

And you can too. Acceptance into this amazing heritage of a family is guaranteed and irrevocable.

All you have to do is ask.