Who Do You Think You Are?
Deidre Schwartz
Helping designers, specifiers, and buyers elevate their projects with exquisite furnishings and finishes that exude style, sophistication, and value.
This is the title of a show on TLC where the producers explore the ancestry of celebrities and share with the rest of their viewing audiences. It's quite a moving experience in many cases and for anyone who has gone down this road in their own genealogy, you already know how emotional this can be.
In 2016, my husband (Michael) and I traveled to southern Indiana to go on a ancestry tour with my uncle Steve from Atlanta, who had already done a great deal of homework on my grandfather's side of the family.
My great-great grandfather's 178th birthday was May 15th this year. His name was Tapley Hughes. He served in the 38th Indiana Voluntary Infantry of the Grand Army of the Republic during the Civil War, from 1861 - 1865. There were 12 battles that he survived (that we know of) and he lived on past the Civil War for another 30 years to a ripe old age of 54! Had he not survived...well...that would be stating the obvious, right?
In our travels of visiting the cemeteries where so many of my ancestors are buried, we stopped along a beautiful valley in the countryside between foothills lush in green topped with a bright blue sky. We were standing on land that was given to Tapley for his service in the Civil War. This 40-acre site is still home to Hughes family. Gerald and Arletta Hughes happen to be home at the time, so we stopped to introduce ourselves as another branch to this family tree. We chatted with them for about an hour and they toured us through their home and spoke of some very colorful stories from this land.
Maya Angelou said "people will forget what you said. people will forget what you did. but people will never forget how you made them feel". I don't remember most of the conversation and only recall the house tour in terms of what we did, but I can tell you exactly how this experience made me feel. I had never met Gerald and Arletta before, but I was instantly whelmed by comfort and familiarity.
We often hear that life is short, but when you learn something like this you do realize that your impact can go on for generations to come. And this, IMHO, is immortality.