I have a large framed picture of one of my ancestors in my room. She was my great-great-great grandmother and rumored to have been a brothel owner. Every time I look at the picture, I think about her and imagine what she was like. She is my connection to my past and I want to learn as much as I can about her. But somehow I’ve not yet gotten round to yet.

I’ve always admired those who work on their family history, and laboriously trace them back centuries. It’s hard work indeed.

I’ve been wanting to do mine for the longest time but never got around to it, not systematically at least. But in the last few months, I’ve been soliciting stories and details, which many of us would not think about asking in “normal conversations”. Every conversation with my parents or my relatives are turning into interrogation sessions!

A professor once told me that the longing for family history or roots is an index of loss. Then, I didn’t agree with her. I had not issues with my identity, felt no dissatisfaction or the need to know “who I really am”. I still don’t. But I am beginning to see her point, though not as she meant it probably. As I see it now, the loss is one of the links with the people whom I’m closest to and who mattered most to me. I’m missing my maternal grandparents especially even though they’ve been gone a long time. Perhaps it is Qing Ming, or perhaps it’s age. I miss them terribly.

That is probably the fuel for me to want to find out more about their lives, their stories. They’ve had intriguing stories I heard. There’s the Second World War, a mad mother (a la Bertha Mason), a loss grave, missing siblings, an opera troupe and family betrayal involved. On the other side, there’s also the Cultural Revolution in the mix, somehow.

But because they were poor and uneducated, they didn’t leave much written legacies, if at all. In a time when documentation is not the norm, this makes it even harder. But try I will, nevertheless, to piece together the stories.

In her blog entry on Ancestry.Com, Jeanie Croasman wrote:

I hated history in high school, a fact that seems absurd to me today since now I’m surrounded by it. But back then, history was just a bunch of names and dates and events that had no impact on me whatsoever. Or so I thought.

Age does funny things to you. Gravity aside, it’s also helped me realize just how much I was personally affected by those events we studied in school. For example, I was always told that my great-grandfather left Austria-Hungary to avoid conscription. What I didn’t know until I started checking dates was that World War I was the bigger trigger.

How true. Perhaps, it’s the education system that makes history boring, not that history is itself boring. That’s besides the point. What’s interesting is the little tip in crafting one’s genealogy – to place everything in a timeline – both personal and the historical – and you might just see the context in which your family history is played out.

Doing this, you’ll see that we don’t just exist in a vacuum, but that there are interesting things that happened around us, and the impact on our private lives, great or small.

These historical events provide an interesting backdrop against which we see our family history. But I’d be careful not to write ourselves into history – making every link no matter how tenuous. This is unless, of course, you have family members directly involved – such as being a wartime commanding officer or leader of a country.

Charting your family timeline is probably a good start to that family history project you’ve been putting off for so long.

This CNN article – Technology helps unearth family trees – highlights the more time-consuming effort of tracing one’s family tree – DNA testing.

One of Singapore’s more prolific geneaologists, Kevin Sheperdson, is featured in the article.

Those who are not keen on subscription-based genealogy websites may find this list of free sites interesting. These sites are, however, Western oriented. Those searching for information relating to the non-Western world may be frustrated. But an interesting list to have, nevertheless.