serendipity • \sair-un-DIP-uh-tee\ • noun

On this July 4th, we will not only celebrate our 246th year of American Independence, but we also have an opportunity to honor the memory of two of our Founding Fathers – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. 196 years ago on the 4th of July, they both quietly passed away just four hours apart. They began as Founding Brothers and ended as rivals. Though they may have had political differences, neither one wavered in their untiring belief in the republican form of government they helped create.

If you look up the definition of indexing, you will find the following definitions:

The search for lost and missing ancestors is commonplace for family historians and genealogists. Today, we are able to utilize technology to our advantage to cast a wider net in hopes of catching these elusive members of our tree, and even then, we aren’t always successful. But what about one hundred or two hundred years ago? How did friends and family members find missing loved ones?

Before the end of February, a news article came across my feed. The article's title stated that there is now a Human Family Tree with over 231 million lineages. The statement reminded me of a quote I had read some time ago in college by Pope John XXIII, "The family is the first essential cell of human society." In fact, it our cells that are the basis of human society according to all the years and time science has devoted to studying where we come from and how we connect.