For Jonathan:

Why do I do genealogy? For my children and grandchildren, and for myself. Because I grew up with only one grandparent (the others had died long before I was born), there was always this troubling feeling of not knowing where we came from, and what made us what we are. The following two quotations explain this better than I can:

The first is from an old posting to the Puerto Rican board by Charles Batiz:

Family history is the study of the past
to find our place in the present,
to learn to hear "the voices in our blood,
the silent voices that run through our veins,
that make up who we are and where we stand
in a never-ending line of ancestors and descendants."

And the second is this poem I came across some years ago:
>From Cronica Mexicayotl, by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc

Never will it be lost,
never will it be forgotten,
that which they came to do,
that which they came to record
in their paintings:

Their renown,
their history,
their memory.

Thus in the future
never will it perish,
never will it be forgotten;
always we will treasure it.

We,
their children
their grandchildren,
brothers,
great-grandchildren,
great-great grandchildren,
descendants,
we who carry their blood
and their color:

We will tell it,
we will pass it on
to those who do not yet live,
to those who are to be born:
the children of the Mexicans,
the children of the Tenochcans....