The Touch of Influence

Reading an old book called "Serendipity" by J. Wallace Hamilton, I found many interesting ideas and thoughts....

The chapter on 'The Touch of Influence' had some interesting thoughts and I quote...

"...Each of us inherited something from our parents. They touched us. But each of our parents had two parents: that's four; and they each had two: that's eight.

Go back to the tenth generation, and each of us had a thousand and twenty-four parent-people; and in the twentieth generation - - -hold your breath now - - - one million forty-eight thousand five hundred and seventy-six!

Who touches me?

They touched me, a million far-off ancestors touched me.

And they were not all saints back there....

Heredity is the time-binder, the touch of the past on the present that links us to the future.

It is a something in the blood, in the bone, in the mind.

No one can tell what may show up.

A child may skip two generations and come up with a reassortment of great-grandfather and Aunt Matilda. Heredity is red hair in a great-grandchild. It's a mole on the cheek. It's a way of laughing or walking or talking. It may be an unexpected spark of genius out of yesterday, or an ear for music, or an eye for beauty, or some realignment out of the remote past that we can't trace anywhere.

Richard Rolle, the Irish poet put it this way:

The limbs that move, the eyes that see,

There are not entirely me;

Dead men and women helped to shape

The mold which I do not escape;

The words I speak, my written line,

These are not uniquely mine.

For in my heart and in my will

Old ancestors are warring still,

Celt, Roman, Saxon, and all the dead

From whose rich blood my veins are fed,

In aspect, gesture, voices, tone,
Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone;

In fields they tilled, I plow the sod,

I walk the mountain paths they trod;

And round my daily steps arise

The good and bad of the centuries...

Their Touch of Influence....much to my surprise...."

Being involved in my online ...Geni Family Tree...which now has over 800 persons on it kinda

makes me see the many ones who have passed before me and how even now....

their and our influence will be felt long after we are gone...

(Click on picture to enlarge)....