Every year I ask my father ‘what would you like for your birthday’? To which he dismissively responds ‘nothing, it is not actually my birthday’.
My father does not know the correct date he was born on, and neither did his parents. He is approximately 61 years of age, well, according to his passport he is! He was born in a small village in the Punjab, India in 1948 or 1949; know one in our family actually knows. I find this so bizarre that he does not know his birth date, but then I realised that many people of that age and above who were also born in India, do not know the correct day that they were born. They claim that in those days in the villages, no records of births were actually made.
I asked my father for some basic information to help me fill in my family tree profile for my Evergenes account. Unfortunately, he was unable to provide me with his date of birth; grand parent’s names and DOB/DOD etc. I was quite astonished at this. I am unable to trace any of my family history which makes me rather sad as one day in the future I hoped to sit down with my children and show them where they came from and how life has changed so dramatically over the past century or so.
The internet and computers are so fundamental to our lives today. We spend so much time on social networking sites, there is no reason that we can not spend a small amount of time each week building our own profiles and that of our family members on Evergenes, so that we can sit down with our children and grandchildren in the years to come and easily discover who our ancestors were. I am sure that one day in the future our descendents will be grateful that we made it easy for them to trace their ancestry.