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thought about her as an actual person who left physical traces in time.
    I found her name on a ship’s register and was stunned to learn that in 1862 she brought her four children by herself from Ireland to Australia on a ship called the
Lightning
. At the time I had two small children of my own, and I did everything in my power to avoid taking them with me to the supermarket, where they made a trip through the dairy section feel like
The
Odyssey
. How did Julia manage her children on that long voyage?
    Once she arrived in Australia, Julia reunited with her husband, Daniel, who had arrived on an earlier voyage. The family lived for a while on the goldfields of rural Victoria, and Julia had five more children. Like so many families of that era, Julia’s lost children along the way. Jeremiah died at fifteen of a fever. Johanna died at eighteen while she was in service in a small country town. I found the browned, crisp transcript of the inquest into her death in the state archives. She had been complaining of pain and was sent to bed. Her employer, Elizabeth Farrell, later checked on her. “I found her very hot and racked with pain,” she said. “I proposed to give her a mustard plaster.” The doctor was summoned and he gave her a dose of medicine and then ordered another dose. “Ought the medicine make her as sick?” wondered Farrell. They left poor Johanna alone, and later Farrell climbed the stairs to look in on her. For a minute she thought she was asleep, but Johanna was gone. “I found her dead,” Farrell said. She then called out to the manager that “Johanna was dead in the bed.”
    Despite the resilience that characterized most of Julia’s life, the hardship of her days flattened me. Once, while I was attending a conference in the United States, I woke at 5:00 a.m. with jet lag after covering in a day approximately the same distance that it took Julia forty days to cross. I told a genealogist at the conference that the thought of her hardships made me sad.
    “But you can be impressed by her!” the genealogist replied, and I was.
    I began to shake the malaise when it occurred to me one day that even though I had all sorts of complicated feelings about Julia, I had no idea what she would have thought of me. Who was I to her? Merely one of her son’s many granddaughters. Here is the brutal asymmetry of a big family
and
time. Julia sits at a node in our family tree from which many, many branches sprout. I, on the other hand, am a twig. Even if she were alive, I’m not sure I would mean much to her.
    Later I found a photo of Julia. She was about seventy at the time, and it was hard to tell if she was just small in stature or shrunken by age. She wore a frilly black dress and a black bonnet, which was secured under her neck with white flowers arrayed at the front. Her eyelids dragged down at their corners. I suspected the photo had been taken to commemorate a death in the family. Did her eyes, light and inscrutable, reflect sorrow? Was it exhaustion? I still don’t know what it means to have a relationship with her, but that was, without a doubt, my father’s nose on her face.
     • • • 
    How do we personally lose or find information about our lineage? Our tendency is to assume that whatever we don’t know about ourselves or our families has simply fallen away naturally, through attrition over time. Certainly, memory has absolute limits, but there are psychological forces at work too.
    In 2012 Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and a colleague wrote about an experiment they had carried out where people in different age groups were asked about either what they had liked, valued, or prioritized ten years earlier or how much they thought their current preferences were likely to change over the next ten years. The scientists found that their subjects were pretty good at assessing how much they had changed in the previous ten years, which was always a considerable amount. By contrast, the participants in