Have you ever wondered what difference one life could possibly make in the grand scheme of things? If you checkout the website, Puzzilla.Org (you can access the site: HERE), you may have that question answered.
It's mind-blowing!
Puzzilla calls itself a "Descendant Viewer." That's appropriate. Not only can you find your genealogy lines going back as far back as records go, but you can click on a specific person and see what affect they've had on the human race.
Here's my line. Each dot represents a specific person. I chose at random a five-times great-grandmother and checked her out. I had never heard of Christina Wampler before. Just clicking on her name gives me the year of her birth, 1753, and where, Lebanon Township in Pennsylvania. I also know where and when she died, 10 October, 1844, Jackson, Ohio.
But what I really love about this website is the button where you can click: Descendants. You can also see the person's ancestors, but that's looking in the past. What clicking Descendants can show you is the past looking to the future.
Here's Christina's descendants going forward four generations. Each one of those dots, from the second, third and fourth rings represents a person, a person that exists because of Christina Wampler. And that's just four generations. I went back six generations to find her so there's two more rings that exist with even more of her descendants.
Like I said before, I know almost nothing about Christina. We can research how people lived in that part of the country during that time in our history, but it doesn't tell us anything about the person. Did she ever wonder about her life? Did she ever think maybe she wasn't important, wasn't going to amount to anything? Did she ever look at her life and ask herself just how important she was to those who came after?
We like to look back on history. I heard once that genealogy was the second-most researched topic on the internet. I don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if was. But we do ourselves a disservice if we think about the potential we have in our contributions to the future. And I wonder if we actually did think more about the future, would it change anything in how we live our lives in the present. That would be an interesting question to ask Christina Wampler.
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