She took over my stepfather's trucking business after he died. She bought a 386 Windows machine for the office, located in the downstairs of her home. A partner did the actual correspondence, billing and expenses, but she would sneak down after hours and boot up to do family genealogy. Her objective: to create a book showing who our ancestors were, and how they came together by chance to create -- us.

She wrote hundreds of letters to other genealogy buffs around the country, tapping into their knowledge about family names and records, every now and then penciling a factoid twig onto our tree -- a great-uncle, a marriage date, a place of burial. It was painstaking work with no short-cuts allowed, and that was anathema to a computer guy like me, who lived for shortcuts.

My inclination was to look up all the Finleys in the encyclopedia and write down the names of all those that weren't convicted embezzlers or paid assassins. Mine was the genealogical school of wishful thinking. At its core was a cheerful willingness to lie to future about the past.

For instance, I discovered that a man named John Finley allegedly showed Daniel Boone the Cumberland Gap, thus opening the way to westward expansion. I wanted him in the tree for sure. Charlie Finley, the owner of the Oakland A's who sold off all his good players and proposed using orange baseballs I wanted out.

It was genealogy by whim. I once wrote that Grandfather Mulligan had a ticket for the Titanic, but lost it in a pub fight. When the good ship went to its watery grave, he was dry in a Liverpool jail. My mother's response was positively Soucherian: "We don't know that."

What she found out, the hard way, was that our people tended to be farmers and teachers, hardy but not especially flashy. She treasured a newspaper clipping from a small weekly in Geauga County, Ohio, circa 1820, describing how my great great great great great great grandmother (great6) Lois Riley, traveled on foot a distance to have some cloth fulled, had to pause on the way home, and spend the night sheltering her daughter in the snow with her coat.

My mom is hardy, too. Two years ago the creek behind her house flash-flooded, submerging much of her paperwork, not to mention the old 386, hard drive and backup included. The CMOS never came back. Her work was trashed, and she was discouraged. Last winter, she had a bad heart attack, and was sidetracked for eight months.

But she's back. A friend of hers lets her use her computer to enter new data, using the new CD-ROM based Family Tree Maker Deluxe 3.01, from Broderbund. The program includes four CD-ROMs containing vast amounts of census and Social Security statistics. She not only validated her own great great great great grandfather, a Charles Thayer, born in 1815 in Braintree, Mass., but she got many new leads to use. As she validates, she can send in the data by modem to Family Tree Maker's world genealogical database, where it will be added in and indexed for other genealogical sleuths.

She left some of the low-tech work to us. This summer she had me drive my family to the township of Rising Sun, Wisconsin, south of LaCrosse. There we photographed and copied down the inscriptions on every grave bearing the Finley or Garin names. My grandparents, Lawrence and Rose, are there, but also scores of cousins and great-greats, soldiers from the Civil War, the World Wars, and Korea.

I charged my kids with the task of locating Finleys and Garins. They went about the work with a gratifying solemnity. They were old enough to know that the dust below them had something to do with them, that a debt was owed both ways.

The most mysterious markers were the oldest. A white marble post marks the resting spot of Michael F. Finley, born in Queens County, Ireland in the June of a year that has been rubbed away by rain, and died in 1881, perhaps at 72 years of age. His wife was Julia O'Brien, born February 17, 1865, in Faircastle, Ireland.

Now I have my own copy of Family Tree Maker, and I have been copying from the handwritten xeroxes my mom made many years ago, trying to rebuild what the flood took out. The more I enter, and see which children survived and what became of them, the better feeling I get for what sort of people we all are, and how far from the tree a nut may fall.

And I wonder what these Finleys and Mulligans and Garins and Husted would think of me making my living huddled over this blinking contraption, compared to the honest toil of hooking a horse to a plough. Would they think my work was noble and respectable, or would they think I was a disgrace to the family work ethic, a dilettante.

Also they would want to know if this marvelous mimicry machine were invented by an Irishman. And I, just as willing to lie about the future to the past, would say, "Certainly."

To ""Future Shoes"" home page