2016 has been such a year of historic discovery and rediscovery for me - learning so much, visiting and revisiting historic places, finding relics and remnants of the lives my ancestors lived in upstate New York as far back as 1831. And whenever I was visiting where they lived, where they grew up and where they died, I always took a moment to try and imagine them or someone in their family standing with me - staring at the grave of a father who had just died in 1892, cleaning railroad cars emptied of city folk on their way to Catskill resorts in the 1920s, the lone colored girl sitting for a class photo in front of the shingled school building in 1914, or that popular teenager on the H.S. football team walking with a jaunty step across the railroad tracks towards the athletic fields in 1940.
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| Julia Ardell Jones (center), daughter of Samuel Jones |
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| Willard Dudley |
And for some reason, what just came to my mind was an image from the future - when my descendants are rummaging through mementos or relics of my life and how they casually note that great grandma Linda Williams was alive when Barack Obama was elected president and also the other one, the outlandish casino owner Donald Trump. A long time ago. Things were so backward then. They'll have no idea how intensely their great grandma admired the former and how traumatic it was for her when eight years later the American people, including members of the KKK voted for the latter.
2016 started out as a great year but ended on a bad note. But it's all part of history. We've been through worse and hopefully we'll survive this.
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