Website Charter

A funny thing happened on the way to constructing the Family Tree.  I began to think about the extraordinary chain of events that led to my being on earth. 

When I created a Family Tree I thought of the long line of individuals that led to my being here.  I thought about minor events in their lives taking a left turn instead of a right turn and how that would have affected the entire family line from there onwards.

None of us would have existed...others would be in our places.

What do I know about these people?  Few of us are able to trace our lineage back much beyond 100-200 years.  Other than royalty,  records simply weren't kept in much detail or were destroyed forever by some natural or man-made disaster.

In some instances, ancestors weren't interested enough to even keep an oral tradition.  In addition, records have been "doctored" for various reasons.

What most of us know extends a  few generations at most.  Anything from personal knowledge of the ancestor, to a single photograph, to only a name or a story is all the information we have.

I am curious about these people because to some degree I am who they were.  I am the result of whatever molded them and allowed their progeny to survive over the millennia.  Their physical attributes were encoded in their genes and are now passed down to mine - but what about their "invisible" attributes?

Could our personalities be at least partially encoded in our genes?

In nature creatures with similarities tend to gravitate towards one another and tend to drive those with differences away...not too different from our species.  This activity would tend to differentiate groups genetically.  It certainly differentiated our physical features why not our mental features too? My experience with different individuals leads me to believe that personalities are to some degree genetically determined.

With the advent of the Internet, record keeping and retrieving is a simple matter.  If our species does survive for thousands of more years (and I have my doubts), any relatives will be more easily able to trace our lives, know who we are and maybe better know who they are.

In these web pages during my time on this planet my main goal is to entertain and communicate with my family.  I'm not trying to change anybody's beliefs about anything.  I'm simply communicating my beliefs.

Ultimately the whole point will be for my future relatives to be able to do a search on Frank Aschert and for better or worse through these web pages get a better idea of who I was.