My Dearest Sarah and Patrick,One of the things we are often told in manuals of genealogy is that in addition to recording what we can of our ancestors, we should also leave a record of our own lives and times for our children, of the kind that we sometimes wish had been left for us.
Before you is a set of stories about your father. When you wake up one morning and notice that you are not the towhead kid that you once were, you get a first hand look at your own mortality. It has long been my intention to leave you both with some tangible evidence of your family heritage. Yes, we have the ancestry tree that has been passed from one generation to another. That tells JTus the who and the what of those who lived before us. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the how and the why of those lives.
One of my own efforts along these lines is Tales from Dystopia, stories about what life was like in the apartheid era in South Africa, which few people under the age of 30 will remember.
