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Wednesday, July 27, 2005

If I could time travel I'd go back to the summer of 1840. For purely selfish reasons, I'd like to go to New York state and look up two of my ancestors- James in Cayuga County and Ebenezer in Steuben County- and ask them about their lives. I've been researching my family's history for almost 30 years (I started when I was a kid) and these two men are still somewhat of a mystery.

Afterwards I'd head west and figure out a way to visit Tucson. It would be a dangerous trip- the Apache Indians were not pleased with outsiders and frequently attacked people in the area. I'd bring along a couple of extra memory cards and take a zillion pictures of the Mexican fort. I'd ask to see the church records and I would photo every page- when the soldiers left in 1856 those records disappeared. I'd ask people what they ate, what kind of games the kids played. I'd inventory their homes and so on. All the things that I'd like to know that would help me make sense of what I dig up.

What would I bring back as a souvenir of 1840? Back in New York I would buy a big cage and have someone catch me a whole bunch of passenger pigeons. They were once the most common bird in North America and were hunted to extinction, the last one dying in a zoo in 1914.

If you could go back in time where would you go and what would you bring back?


Sitting on the back steps at 6:02 PM.

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