Y Teulu: The Family

               Y Cyntaf:  the first          Only in fiction does a story have a beginning, middle and end.  In real life every story is ongoing, the present being a sum of all the little incidents that led to that moment...and the future flows from there. I had to pick a point where to start my story and I decided that I would try to follow the tale from when our predecessors stepped off the boat.     While I theoretically could cover any number of families from both the maternal and the paternal side,  I decided to just go with what I knew and what I could find on my paternal side.  It's not that mother's family is any less interesting; it's that her family history in North America goes back to before the American Revolutionary War and that would cover a lot of typing.  I just don't type that fast, nor am I creative enough to fill in all the big blanks in that tale.     On the...

                              Y Beible     Where does one start when looking at your family.  The fact that a person is alive and reading this prose means that you have a very long chain of ancestors extending forever back in time.  Indeed, somewhere around 3 to 8 % of us have a Neanderthal ancestor and carry the genes to prove it.        That very fact begs the question :what about heaven?  If there is heaven, who would we choose to hang out  with for eternity?  The Neanderthal Bubba who can hunt and kill a wooly mammoth or your shrill mother who never did anything particularly cool?     One thing many families have is the proverbial "Family Bible", inside of which we can find, in faded spidery script, the threads of an incomplete genealogy.  Many family members are there, highlighted as people of renown, some family members were mer...