Published: November 05, 2009 10:53 pm         

Just how fragile are each of our lives?

Have you ever asked yourself the question, why am I here?

No, I don’t mean in the biblical sense, the philosophical sense, the evolutionary sense or even the biological sense.

I’m talking about the genealogical reason for you and for me to be in the space we currently occupy on planet Earth.

I’ve mentioned before each of us is our own history book. When we were born, where we schooled, who we married and where we lived all are a part of history.

And while the vast majority of us don’t consider our places in history to be all that consequential, each and every one of us is important.

Just as we contribute daily in some small way to the history of our community, our county, this state and this nation, so our ancestors staked their places in Earth’s collective history book with their lives.

Have you ever considered the consequence just one of your distant ancestors had upon you being who you are today?

Take for example one of your great, great-grandfathers. For argument sake let’s just say he was a Union soldier, fighting in the Civil War for the state of Pennsylvania along about the year 1862.

Let’s say he was one of the thousands of brave men who charged into the very teeth of the shot and shell storm produced by the Confederacy’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia, as regiment upon regiment of Union infantry stormed Mary’s Heights in the deadly battle at Fredericksburg, Va.

Thousands of Americans died that December day on the frozen slopes of the Virginia countryside. 

All those men probably had wives or sweethearts at home, fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and children.

If they died during the battle, each death had a profound effect on the subsequent genealogical family tree of his or her lineage. (Yes her ... since there are a number of documented cases of women posing as men, fighting in regiments both North and South during the Civil War).

Each death meant that soldier would produce no more offspring, would not marry, nor work in a job or do anything from that point on, to add to a family’s collective history.

But if your great, great-grandfather lived through the battle, that is one of the chief reasons you are here to read this column. You were born because he (or she, as the case may be) lived to biologically conceive your great-grandmother or your great-grandfather.

Peculiar, isn’t it?

You literally would never have been created had one of your forebears been killed in battle. It’s just that simple.

Or, they could have died in an accident, drowned in a river or simply succumbed to any one of a vast number of diseases that have plagued mankind.

It kind of gives you an inkling as to the fragility of all our lives. We are the collective existence of all of our forebears, back to the dawn of man.

Had anything slipped up along the way, boom .... you would never have been born.

I tend to think of these abstract things when I do genealogy, which has become an increasing passion these days. 

I think it somehow is hard-wired into our subconscious — we’d all like to see just where we came from, who were our ancestors, what they looked like and why they lived their lives the way they did.

The nexus for this entire line of thought occurred to me one day when I was diligently working on my own family history, and found my great, great-grandfather’s military records in the National Archives. He is the soldier I actually described above — a second lieutenant in the Union Army in 1862, whose 123rd Pennsylvania Regiment was one of those making the final charge up the slopes of Mary’s Heights that fateful December day in 1862.

Had he been shot down that bone-chilling day, you would not be reading these words. In fact, I may well be here because of a bad case of dysentery which afflicted him immediately after the battle.

He came down with one of a soldier’s greatest complaints at the conclusion of the famous Mud March, which mired the Army of the Potomac after its Fredericksburg defeat. He was confined to an Army hospital for several months, and in fact, missed the great Battle of Chancellorsville, Va., that following May, when a substantial number of his regiment fell on the field of battle during the Confederate victory.

Had he been with his regiment, he might well have died or been wounded. And as quick as you can say amen, I would not even be an afterthought (or a forethought, as the case may be).

I know, this may be a little too Ray Bradbury or Rod Serling for many of you, but it sure got me to contemplating life.

So again, I put it to you to consider — just how fragile are we to view each of our lives, historically speaking?



Christy is news editor at the News & Eagle, and may be reached a davidc@enidnews.com