I think I got my love of history from genealogy. I was writing down my family history before Ancestry.com was a thing, before you could just click a button and find a record. At ten and twelve years old, I was paging through hardcover family history books line by line, connecting names, interviewing my grandparents, including my great-grandmother, digging up any little facts that connected me to the past that made our present. The past that made me. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to prove a perfect pedigree (spoiler, we come from a long line of farmers). Instead, I found that putting names to the people who lived before me brought the history alive. It wasn’t just a date and an event on a calendar. It was a life altering event that my relative got to experience. What did they feel? What did they see, from their perspectives as common people?

This past weekend’s fourth of July holiday has me feeling a bit nostalgic. The fact that the United States of America is now 250 years old is not lost on me, and I am glad the celebrations matched. After all, my ancestors were here in Pennsylvania when the Declaration was signed, just miles away in Philadelphia. Despite the weekend’s brutal 100 degree Pennsylvania heat, we got to see the massive “Big Boy” steam engine roll through New Ringgold. I made it to Mount Carmel to sign books at their celebration with Secondhand Rows Bookstore, a location and crowd I am looking forward to working with more in the future. My kiddo got to see his very first fireworks! Then after the loudest parade I have ever attended, a picnic or two, and a town-wide reading of the Declaration of Independence, I somehow ended up diving into another writing project. The source material, my family tree.

What I found in my latest Ancestry.com dive brought all the reasons I love genealogy, history, and creative writing to life. It turns out, if you follow my maternal lines through my maternal lines, I have an unbroken line of women that have been living in this same area of Pennsylvania for two-hundred-fifty years. How crazy is that? Crazier still is that the last generation I can connect to in that line was a baby girl born in June of 1777, just one year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Was she a freedom baby? You see why the creative urge got bubbling. I have gone down a rabbit hole of researching not only the family history, but the transformation of motherhood and its ideals over the centuries, in hopes to somehow bring these women together with a common thread. Whether or not I keep this tale within my family or not is to be determined, but my point is the same. We have so much to learn from our history. We can celebrate what our ancestors did right and learn from their mistakes to make the world better. We can still sit down, hundreds of years after our ancestors drafted a nation, and use our imaginations to envision a world better than this one.

Keep imagining, America! Looking forward to another 250 years!