Sparky searches for pieces of his sub-personalities

Following up on my post of October 22nd, I have collected the skills of my ancestry.com expert and super techie and have forged ahead in my construction of the Breeskin family tree. This has led to my experiencing strong emotions and, for a rare time in my life, I do not know how to label the emotions. What happens to me when I see a picture of someone whose existence I knew of but have never seen is a very complex feeling. It consists of amazement, awe, sadness, and emotions that I am not even prepared to name. Whatever label I will end up giving to the emotions will, no doubt, come clear in time.

My grandiose fantasy is that the family feuds which were initiated before my birth and which have been handed down unto the generations will somehow be minimized by the process of generational change, and the source of the original schisms will recede in importance as the new generations flow forward.

It is my hope that my work in connecting the parts of the family is that the overall mosaic will somehow bring peace and closure to the war concealed in family secrets. This may be grandiose on my part as certain people gain a sense of identification by clinging to past hurt.

Through the magic of ancestry.com I can put faces on names: This significantly alters the gestalt as I now can see a picture of a person whose name I carry somewhere in my head: These people become real and that shifts my perception of them.

My next step, with the help of my friends, is to share the family tree with members of the Breeskin family through Facebook, asking them to fill in any of the missing pieces. Among my motivating principles is the unspoken mandate from my father that his story would not be forgotten. While he never said this directly to me, I know that he saw his place in history as a meteor flashing through the skies. In that sense I see myself as a keeper of the flame whose self imposed task is to pass on the flame to the next generation.

An old African saying is that, "When an old person dies a library is burned down." My self imposed responsibility is to capture the record and to pass it on to the next generation. Please stand by for further details as I continue to fill in missing pieces of my sub-personality and my character.