Family visit

Tuesday, October 15th

We spent today visiting Dan's grandmother, Miriam, and getting acquainted with where she lives and meeting all her new friends. We ate lunch with her and a very jovial fellow named Milt who lives in the same retirement community and has several volunteers jobs around "campus". He was quite amusing company and was full of funny stories and enlightened insights about family ancestry and others subjects. He'd done quite a bit of research on his family's history and had worked his way back through his family tree and then calculated the mathematical equation to trace the number of ancestors he would have at any given point of time. Assuming that every person has two parents in the prior generation and that these also each have two parents and so on one quickly arrives at an unrealistically large number of ancestors going back only a few hundred years. From this may be deduced that there must have been quite a bit of intermarriage between relatives and is also proof that it is not necessary to go back very far in time to find an ancestor that one shares with a large number of present-day relatives.

If there is one thing that we have learned on this trip, though, it is that it is not at all necessary to share any ancestry with other people in order to feel like they are family.

We spent the rest of the day with Dan's grandmother, exchanging stories and pictures and helping her with the a few small things around the apartment. She treated us to dinner in the dining hall that evening for which Connie also joined us, and later in the evening we went back to Connie's apartment to spend another night there.