Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. ~ Robert Jarvik

My youngest grandson is a natural-born leader and we see it especially when he's out on the baseball field.  This child has no fear.  Pitching doesn't faze him.  The coach can put him at any position on the field and he's going to give it the best he's got.  He has tons of energy and nerves of steel.  He gets the rally chants going in the dugout and he's the loudest chanter of all.  He knuckle-bumps and pats his teammates on the shoulder to encourage them.  He dispenses tons of heartfelt hugs, like this one pictured here when he and his team won the league championship for their age group, arms wrapped around both of his buddies. He has a ferocious will to win.  A very high intellect.

Where did this come from?!

A couple of generations ago he had a great-uncle named Julian.  Another natural-born leader and full of the imp until he died.  I don't know how many times my husband and I see our grandson do something and we'll look at each other and say:  "Uncle Julian!"  He had three brothers and he was the ring leader in everything they did, the first one his parents questioned when one of his ideas backfired.  Julian also had a very high intellect and loved to invent things.  It remains to be seen where our grandson's brains will take him.

I find genetics fascinating, don't you?  My best friend Liz loves to do genealogy and a few years back she did a very detailed family tree for me that took hours...months...of research, I'm sure.  It's one of my most treasured gifts ever.  She was able to trace my family back to the 1620's.  I like to take it out every now and then and just sit and leaf through the pages.  There are birth certificates, birthplaces, places of death, obituaries, emigration papers and census records. Photographs. There must be close to 200 pages in it.  I was named after my great-grandmother and a great-aunt on my father's side of the family. They, my great-grandfather, and grandfather came to America from Sweden in the early 1900's and settled in Massachusetts.  My great-grandfather worked in a wire mill and my grandmother stayed home.  She spoke very little English from what I know.  In Worcester in that time period I've been told there was a strong community of Swedish immigrants and my great-grandmother never really felt the need to learn a new language.  My great-aunt died young by drowning.  My grandfather lived to be in his 60's and died when I was around 10 years old.

As I page through the family tree, I wish written words could speak.  I wonder how many generations back my dad's and my left-handedness go.  I wonder how many of the women were fiercely independent like I am.  I know one of my grandmothers loved to write too, and she had a lot of articles published in magazines when she was a young woman in the 1920's.  I wonder if anyone else had a lazy eye, or how many family members had one ear higher than the other like my Dad did. For family coming from Sweden and France and England...what must it have felt like to stand on the decks of the ships and watch their homelands disappear...then several days later watch the Statue of Liberty rise on the horizon as they approached America.  Some stayed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Vermont.  Some went to Canada.  Some to Ohio. One great-uncle even ventured out to northern California and had a mule train.  Fascinating.  Somehow...somewhere...all the connections came together to make me.