Over the past few years I’ve dabbled in researching my family history, going hard at it until no more clues are available, then coming back a year or so later to see if any new information is out there. It satisfies a certain itch I have for solving puzzles, but it also makes me wonder about rootless existence.

I got fantastically lucky in my last go around with genealogy, learning that my mother’s side of the family goes back to Jamestown. I got 17th century bona fides, yo! On the other hand, I think there’s nothing here to be bragging about; I had nothing to do with any of this, I was just born into it. Somehow, though, it justifies my sense of home in Virginia. I’ve mentioned before my inner confusion about ending up in Ohio. I don’t object to it, it’s just that it’s not what I anticipated, how ever subconsciously. Looking back at my family tree, I see generations living within the same few counties, and often because they predated the establishment of said counties, with larger counties subdividing into new ones while the families went about their business. Me, I was an Air Force brat, born on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, then lived several years in Florida before, at the whims of Uncle Sam, ending up in Virginia, where my great, great, great (etc . . .) grandfather John Combs (Coombs) had landed some 350 years earlier. It was a good circle, I think.

Although I wasn’t born in Virginia, it’s always felt like my place, especially because I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is an incredibly transient kind of place. In NoVa, you could be considered old school if you remembered when I66 just came to an abrupt end in Prince William County, or if you saw Billy Kilmer under center at RFK. Even when I left NoVa to be with Dr. Evil in West Virginia, it was a sort of homecoming, because my mother’s family was from southern West Virginia. But when it comes to Ohio, I’ve got nothing, no connections, save for Dr. Evil’s parents. Ohio will most likely be the last place I live, and I won’t have any progeny (I mean, at least I don’t think I will; thoughts, Dr. Evil?) begotten in Ohio, so when some future researcher follows my path via census information (assuming the census survives Trump), my move to Ohio will be a weird outlier in a tale beginning with the landing of the Marigold in the Virginia Colony in May 1619. Will either of the girls want to take over the farm when Dr. Evil and I get old? Maybe. Maybe not. And even if they do, it will mean only three partial generations worth of roots in Vinton County, Ohio.

Maybe we Americans are just past putting long roots down. We don’t work lifetime jobs any longer, so why should our addresses not change too?