The higher you climb in your family tree, the more you'll realize that the tree's not really a tree. For it's branches divide again and again, more and more of them reconnect with one another, as well as with the branches of the family trees of everyone else on earth. The further you look into your own genealogy, then, the more you're struck by the fact that we're all related to Dante and Mozart, to Churchill and Hitler - and to one another. To me, that's the ultimate lesson of genealogy: a lesson not in snobbery and self-importance, but in the fact that we're all members of one large family. Bruce Bawer