Every day I would try to check something off of the list that my grandfather had given me. I remember finding the flat he'd lived in - following his instructions and remembering to take pictures of the flat on the left. I loved imagining my grandfather walking the same streets that I was walking. I was worried about not finding the botanical clock in the garden, and on my last day in the city, I did find it. He was so excited to see that it still existed.
I began thinking about how many times we stand in the same places that our ancestors stood, and we don't realize it. How often are we tracing their steps, and we're unaware? Ancestry.com has released a new feature in which they will help you travel to your ancestral homeland. One of the packages will even take you to the exact homesteads owned by your family. I've stomped through the woods - somehow escaping poison ivy - to try to find the last stones of a homestead wall. How often, I wonder, do we go to the places they went without realizing it?