Message from Virginia Nuta, President of the Germanna Association

I suppose we have to face the fact that not everyone is fascinated by history and genealogy, and that - well, too often -- this includes our own children.  We mutter to ourselves, "Just wait until I'm gone…."

 Then there's the spouse… "Spend all the time you want at that courthouse, I'll just read a book until you get back…." 

We meet people who mistake our obsession with history and genealogy for a hobby.  Have you not heard them say, "I was thinking of getting into that, how do you get started?"  We eagerly respond, at first, and then, eventually, we notice the glazed expression on their faces and we take pity on them. 

Even the habitués of the local history society or Family History Center can only be so interested; their families are usually not your families.  We can trade techniques, but no one really cares that your 3rd great-grandfather lived on the side of a certain mountain, or that his father migrated to a certain county in Kentucky. In sum, this can make for a fairly lonely genealogist.

For me, getting to know my Germanna cousins through our reunion, our website, and Sgt. George's mailing list, has provided a warm genealogical haven in a cold ahistorical world.  It's a way to get together with people who not only share genes and bloodlines, but also care about the same things.  We want to know about the past, not only who our ancestors were, but also how they lived and what influenced their lives. 

We also want to preserve what we have learned; we think it is important.  We believe in George Santayana's famous aphorism: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," (sometimes called Santayana's Law of Repetitive Consequences).

This means we value truth over mythology.  We would prefer to know more about our peasant ancestors - who crossed a wide cold ocean to arrive in an unknown new world -- than to muse over the unlikely possibility of aristocratic origins.  We are far more proud of our peasant ancestors' courage than you can imagine.  We do not want to forget them.

Join us;  participate;  help with our projects; let us help with yours.

An organization like the Germanna Foundation is better equipped than the lonely genealogist to preserve the past, and that is a second good reason to support Germanna.  We have an institutional core that can house your personal family document in a library where it is most likely to be found by another Germanna descendant. 

We preserve the knowledge of certain events that happened in certain places by telling the story of Alexander Spotswood, Fort Germanna and Salubria.  We publish histories and family genealogical histories that will outlive us. 

We believe that, because of the institution - the Germanna Foundation, we will have preserved the knowledge of our ancestors, and of our past, for the future.  Perhaps, then, our children will indeed find this knowledge fascinating, after we are gone.