I can’t really explain it. I don’t have a childhood memory that relates either to a cookie jar, or to some furtive pleasure that’s connected with breaking through a barrier (brick wall?). But when I pause to consider why I enjoy genealogy so much, I always seem to come back to this metaphor:
Every time I make a breathtaking discovery, it seems as though I’ve just snatched a cookie out of a cookie jar...one that I wasn’t supposed to raid. [Heh, heh.]
Is that the feeling you get, or is it different?
Henry Z. “Hank” Jones, Jr. writes about “Psychic Roots,” and he argues that the ancestors WANT us to find them. I can’t take issue with that, because I often end up feeling a “connection” of some kind with some of the individuals I research.
But the way that I describe my glee, at snatching some discovery away from the black hole of lost family history, suggests something entirely different. I feel as though “someone” has been hiding something from me -- something that I was NEVER supposed to know -- and that, against all odds, I’ve managed to seize this prize!
So, for today’s Open Thread, share with me your own thoughts about what it feels like to make a significant breakthrough. I’ll give an example below the fold, and cite a real-life road block to my getting results in my paternal line.
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