Tracing family history and lineages can be a hassle, a hard one at that. Some families have absolutely no trace of their tree, and some keep every record at every disposal. My family was never the one to appreciate the fragility and the necessity of keeping track of your ancestors, for it is their mistakes you can learn from, it is their traditions that we carry on or alter, and it is their name that we descend to our younger ones. Fortunately, I went into full research last year using both AncestryDNA’s database and excerpts from my close family members and was able to conclude a strong understanding of my family’s heritage. My mother’s side of the family emigrated from Sicily in the early 90s and settled in Lebanon, where they adopted the …show more content…
In fact, he himself regards the 50s to about 1967-1968 as the most peaceful time ever. Influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, he adopted a strong alignment to Communism and favored the Soviet Union in every political battle against the U.S, which was again, defying social norms at a time where a majority of Lebanese had the full support of the U.S especially during the Eisenhower and Kennedy regimes. He had completed his high school education by 1969, and planned on going into college by the mid-1970s until, to his shock and everyone else’s, the Civil War had started in 1975 and my father was conscripted into the army to serve for two years. Upon returning home from his service in 1977, he found his family of a father, mother and seven siblings in shambles, near-homelessness and poor-stricken due to the war and the loss of my grandfather’s job, becoming an alcoholic. He postponed his college plans until he could safely immigrate all his siblings and mother to the United States and worked day and night for years as a mechanic and a construction worker until 1983, where he finally sent all of them stateside and could finally focus on his education and father’s well-being. In 1985, he acquired his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from France in 1988. He became an art history professor at the University of Lebanon in Tripoli and met my mother: one of his students, in 1991. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, my grandfather lost all hope in everything, and drank himself to death as the last thing he could hold on to is gone (Communism). My father took his death quite well, and managed to recover very quickly, with being a man who learned how to cope with