Nor do I keep bugs in plastic baggies.

The other day I went up to an old New Hampshire mill town for the committal of a relative's remains at the family grave. The thing about that - other than such cemeteries being, essentially, a French Canadian phonebook {Ledoux, Dauphinon, Perrier, Mercier, etc} - was that it was an opportunity to fill in the gaps.

Let me rephrase. My dad has this habit of turning to one of my brothers or to me, this during an extended family get-together, and asking some kind of personal question that's just come to his mind: "Where will you be living next fall?" "What's your next trip to Russia hold in store for you?" "Tell me your hopes and dreams."

Well. That last I'm more likely to intone than he, but you understand. The interment became an exercise in digging up (horrible pun, that) aspects of my genealogy I never knew existed, like this, my great-grandfather's headstone; like the house in which my grandmother grew up; like my father's easy tour-guide spiel as we passed streets and buildings I'd never seen before.

I didn't even have to travel to Ukraine to get it.