My search for genealogical facts began seven years ago when I was anticipating the births of two grandchildren in a short space of months. I realized I was too poor to give them the college education and business foundation Forbes, Buckley, or Rockefeller might endow their grandchildren. What gifts could I give these children that they would find valuable, but weren’t costly?

I might have made quilts–if I were patient and talented. I could have made nice sweaters, but experience told me they would be outgrown and discarded before the children could appreciate them. Finally, it occurred to me: I would give them five hundred ancestors.

I set out in search of a genealogy book. Soon I was hooked on the thrill of the hunt, the kick of detective work. Sometimes my mistakes became more interesting than my historical facts.

Unfortunately, my father died a few years before I went into high gear research. When I had asked him family questions in the past, he only grumbled. My father, Bennett (Ben) Eckerson, had been the sort of person who never wanted to admit he didn’t know something. He would either make up an authoritative-sounding factoid, or attack the question as stupid. From him I had always received short answers.

Now I tried to remember his few sparse comments about our family tree, and to sort out what was helpful from what was a cranky lack of knowledge.

Where had his ancestors come from? He didn’t know, maybe Sweden. "My grandfather was a drunk," he said. "He left town before I could ask him."

My father was orphaned when he was nine. After that, he lived with his mother’s people, insulated from the reputedly unsavory grandfather.

What was the grandfather’s name? "I don’t know," he said. "We called him Old Bastard Eckerson."

Was he literally a bastard, or was this a moral condemnation? "Yes," he said, taciturn as always.

I went looking in the LDS microfiche for Eckersons who had unmarried mothers. Oddly enough, my great-grandfather was clearly recorded as having been a legitimate child. He wasn’t descended from Swedes, either, but from New Amsterdam Dutch. My father might have known that–he had attended the Dutch Reformed Church as a youth. Either he was playing dumb with me or he thought my interest in ancestors was useless. I had to find out the facts for myself, crouched over microfiche readers for months.

The "old bastard" had his effect, even though his reputation was ill founded. In my long searches through the archives, I found a Ben Eckerson who had no father. He wasn’t born in 1917 like my father, but rather in 1705. His given name wasn’t Bennitt, but rather Benoni, a Hebrew name meaning, ‘son of my sorrow.’

The story of Benoni fascinated and captivated me. He was the son of my distant grandfather’s sister, Rachel, who was betrothed to a son of the Stuyvesant family. When her fiance, Peter, was drowned, their son was born in tragedy. It seemed that the Stuyvesants were a family of tragedy–child after child died. The graveyard was full of boys named Peter. Benoni lived to the age of twenty or so, then died like the others.

It is, in a sense, a story of the whole human family. Until very recently, babies were more likely to die than to reach adulthood, even in prominent families.

I became further drawn into old life, history, graveyards, human struggle. I searched for the names of ancestors, but found I needed to study farming habits, customs, food, even languages of those long-ago people as well.

Eventually I produced a book for my grandchildren, cataloguing many more than five hundred ancestors. They still aren’t old enough to tell me what they think of it, but the effort changed my life. The gift to my grandchildren became a quest of my own.