Patricia Riordan

Roots

My father was by no means a professional genealogist. He taught history at the local high school and spent too much time in the library. Between grading papers, he would look up public records, attempting to document his broken lineage. Sitting in rush hour traffic, he would map out his family tree in his head. A rush of leaves falling from a single branch when he found sixteen children from a single set of parents. A branch broken when he found out a family had succumbed to a disease curable today, but deadly in the 19th century.