I’ve been going through old pictures of my grandparents and great-grandparents with my son as he puts together a family history presentation for his US history class. On the Hubbell side of the family, we know everything you can know from the 1640s on, when Richard Hubball first walked onto the shores of Colonial America. There’s even a foundation for family members and a big blue book that has everyone’s name it — and their associated number. They have a reunion every year. It’s weird, because on the Jaffe side of the family, which includes Jaffes, Londons, Boxers, Pasternacks, Padvas and other names lost to history, it’s hard to get hard information going back more than one or two generations. Partly that’s because there are few of that generation still alive and we younger people didn’t care enough when they were around to ask all the questions we ought to have.

Partly it’s because so many in my family came here at the turn of the 20th century, speaking little or no English, using new names they created out of the old, which had far too many consonants for their liking or their new neighbors to pronounce. That we are Jewish and our family and records of them vanished with the Holocaust puts another veil over our past.

It got me thinking about what it will be like in another couple generations, when my son’s grandchildren do a similar project. There are no more secrets for us, are there? If you live in a modern society and have even a modest amount of wealth, your life is no longer invisible. You exist online. Your records are digitized. There will be no loss of birth or death or marriage records. With enough time, you can find out who you are and who those who came before you were.

Even adoptions are more likely to be open, and there are some laws on the books allowing adoptees more access to information about their genetic parents.

I am the last of the generations who know so little. I don’t know the names of all my great great uncles and aunts  and their offspring — and there are copious numbers of them. I don’t know death dates or places where people were born. Was it Kovno (in Lithuania) or Rovno (Russia)? Depends on which piece of writing in my grandmother’s scrawl you want to believe. Was the family name Landinsky or Longvinsky before it was changed to London? And was Jaffe changed from Jarkow by my great grandfather when they arrived in Massachusetts? Or was it really changed by the people on Ellis Island (something the Ellis Island officials say never happened, no matter how many families have stories of names changed to something more American by officials during the emigration process). Were we really somehow related to Hyam Solomon who helped finance the Revolutionary War? How? Via whom? Because I can’t figure it out and the people who might are all dead.

Most of what I have are bits of stories. Most of what my great-grandchildren will have will be electronic, perhaps stored in some strange way right in our brains. I feel cheated in a way. And I suppose a little more compelled to ask the questions of the few people who are left who can answer them.