Blood is an amazing thing. You may meet up with a family member not seen for years who in turn introduces you to someone you've never met or even heard of. Within moments you can be chatting merrily away, starting out with nothing in common other than your kin. Somehow you seem to trust the new acquaintance and share intimate details about family connections. You may even be an in-law so have no actual blood connection to the family member himself. No matter, it's still family. In some nationalities these ties are extremely strong, stifling even. We used to hang out with an extended family from a Mediterranean country where the whole kit and caboodle would gather each Sunday for lunch. It was hard for a family member not to show up. Some people spend hours tracing family roots in the hope of turning up a famous ancestor, who, once discovered, gives them bragging rights and a sense they're special. Silly really, after all people differ hugely even within families, let alone down the generations, so any sense of superiority derived from an illustrious forebear is just spurious. Famous people are often far more revered than they deserve. Some were just plain lucky and others plain obnoxious, but history has been kind to them. There are far more people who led valuable, exemplary lives and passed on unserenaded. Our family claims Admiral Sir Henry Morgan as an ancestor - both an Admiral and a knight! Sounds good but actually he was a terrible thug, a privateer who tore around the Caribbean sacking and looting cities, including Panama in 1671. The QSL is from the US Naval facility at Balboa in Panama, a utility station heard in Cape Town in 1969.
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