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I got to thinking about ancestors recently. When I lived in New York City, I occasionally dropped into the big public library on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, where I would walk past the Genealogy Room, where people sat behind huge stacks of books, looking up their ancestry. I suspected they wanted to do the job themselves, because when you hire OTHER people to do it for you, they so often come up with lists containing minor royalty. No one ever seems to have any ancestors who were ordinary folk (except for me!)
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