My Obsession with Connecting the World
I really, really like family trees. Maybe it’s because there’s always an air of mystery and history to them. Sure, your grandmother and your grandfather gave birth to your dad and aunts and uncles, but what’s the story behind their marriage? Was your grandmother in love with someone else first but that person died in the war and then she married your grandfather?
When I was a kid, my grandmother told me about a legend regarding my family’s last name. Years later, I met someone online with our same last name and he too knew the legend. I started building my family tree in college (oh my God, I graduated from college fifteen years ago gasps in Spanish). I started small. My main goal at the time was to connect as many people with my mother’s unique last name as I could. If you’ve ever gone into geneaology, you’ll know that it is a rabbit hole you may never climb out of. I printed out hundreds and hundreds of pages of people’s names, dates, and their offspring.
Last year, my husband got me a six-month subscription to Ancestry.com. If you don’t know how it works, it’s pretty simple–you can build a tree for free, but you need a subscription to link records and to look at other people’s public trees. Having a subscription opens a whole new world of research. My tree went from maybe a few hundred, to thousands of connections. I added my husband and the small bit of information he had and another brancch was added that led to the founding fathers. It’s so exciting to add hints to each person that you’re connected to. Because of the number of people that I have in my tree, I have thousands and thousands of hints. It can get overwhelming.
I stopped my subscription–for now–to Ancestry and I miss it sometimes. Until a few days ago when I had a great idea. I could put together my obsession with family trees and Game of Thrones. Of course George R.R. Martin provides with family trees at the end of all of his books, but the families are not all connected (understandably since there are hundreds of people). So now I’ve decided to make an epic Westeros family tree. I know I’m not the only geek out there who is doing this, because I can see the hints pop up every time I add a new person. I love the connections and history that Martin has created in his books. Like in real life, the world is affected by even the smallest of changes. The first and second-born sons of the king die and they both lose their opportunity to rule Westeros, therefore sending a ripple effect through history. People who shouldn’t be even close to the throne now sit on it.
The more information Martin gives us, the more his complex world–and our family trees–grow, and the more fun it gets. The same for my real family tree which I hope to get back to sometimes later this year so I can keep connecting branches scattered all over the world.
