Captain Richard and Rachael Medora (Pryor) Taylor, my great-great grandparents

It seems to me that hunting down our roots has become a national pastime.  Not a day goes by but what I don’t have a conversation with someone who has recently spit in a vial or swabbed their inner cheek and is now waiting for news about their origins.  Me too.  Nyel’s Christmas gift to all of us (Marta, Charlie, himself, and me) was one of those Ancestry DNA kits. We should all hear any day now.

Of the four of us, I am probably the least curious about the results of my own test.  Thanks to family members on both sides, genealogical data has been accumulating for many generations – in some cases going back to the fourteenth century!  On my mother’s side, it was her brother, Willard, who spent more than sixty years in the avid pursuit of our roots.  And that was in the low-tech days of visiting county seats and city halls and searching through dusty military archives up close and personal.

Willard Espy, circa 1940

In my most-likely-never-to-be-published biography of Willard, I call the chapter I’ve devoted to his genealogical endeavors, “Chasing the Begats.”  It begins like this:

That Willard had read the Bible three times by the time he was eight without once skipping so much as a word – especially not in Genesis – was an oft told family story.  When asked about his diligence in his study of that particular book, he explained that the begats were the foundation of all that came afterwards.  He never changed his mind on that score, but on the matter of which begats were included and which were not, he had this to say:

“The Bible is very clear about when and how the Lord created Adam, but I cannot find anything about the creation of Espys.  We tend to explain away the omission as a bad translation.”

Besides looking for family roots, Willard was interested in word origins.  Of his dozen and a half published books, all but two or three had to do with word derivations, meanings, and usage.  Had he been born a generation later, he would have reveled in the possibilities of searching the World Wide Web.  Maybe.

“Almanac of Words at Play” ©1980

I have to admit that there is something about getting instant answers that’s just a wee bit disappointing.  Like this morning when I looked up “must have gone down my Sunday throat” – an expression used in my childhood when someone choked while eating. Sure enough, there was the etymology right on a site called “World Wide Words:  Investigating the English Language Across the Globe.”  Damn!

Though I probably knew better in my heart of hearts, I liked to think that it was an expression used only in our family – especially since I’ve never heard anyone else use it.  On the other hand, I’ve always been told that none of us ever has an original thought.  It’s probably a DNA thing…