Weekly Writing Challenge: Digging for Roots – Eight Generations

I’m on a roll here … the Weekly Writing Challenge now.  Digging for roots.  Who am I.  Where I came from.  How I am related to others.  Ancestors and ancestries …

Tracing family roots is an on again off again project.  My father is one of fifteen siblings – seven from his natural mother, eight from his step-mother.  My mother is one of ten siblings.  I only have two siblings, and when I was younger, I would often think of how it would be like to have more than three of us running around.

I don’t exactly know when I started to get interested in tracing the family roots.  Perhaps it was because my father would make a comment every now and then about something that reminded him of the past … but then would not elaborate. So as the years went on, I would try to collect all the little bits and pieces that he would talk about … which again was not much.  And so the project lay dormant, until the next comment that would revive it.

I made a great breakthrough about four years ago.  *sigh* Not much progress since then, and the blog that I had started to document this journey is also sadly dormant.  I need to squeeze this in to the remaining minutes of my day to work on it as well.  Anyway, I obtained a copy of a handwritten family tree from my aunt, who in turn had been given the document during a business trip to the ‘ancestral’ town.  Not sure exactly how it happened, but it seems that upon hearing her maiden name was Feliciano, a distant-distant relative came up and gave her the document – ten wonderful handwritten pages of the Feliciano family tree, of which I got a copy.

OCD that I am, I mapped and charted out the document … and now I know that I am the seventh generation, and my children are the eighth generation of what seemed to be the founders of the town.  And not just any founders … they were the stuff that urban legends are made of … they were famously killed by a couple of crocodiles.  And not just any regular crocodiles either .. the crocodile couple actually had names too!

Wow.  Can’t get any better than that.   I really must get back to researching this family tree …

Excerpt from PalawanFeliciano: The Beginning –