There's a blog out there . .

. . . called Sepia Saturday. It's delightful! No, truly! Bloggers post photo-memorabilia of themselves when young, their parents, grandparents and so on and it is heartwarming to see and read how people treasure their old photographs, very often of people they never saw, cannot remember, know only from family lore and anecdote.  

All based on an assumption, which may or may not be valid, but bearing in mind most of human history, probably isn't.  Viz . .  that your blood-line is the same as your "paper-line" which Genes Reunited or Ancestry.com turns up for you, or, to put the point in less circumlocutory langauge -  yer forebears always behaved themselves.  (In case you don't get it yet . .  is that photo of yer Great Grandaddy actually yer Great Grandaddy or is it a photo of someone who was out playing golf while yer real Great Grandaddy was . . er . . .er . . . entertaining yer Great Grandma!) 

I think that the single most thought-provoking thing about who we are is this. For evolutionists, that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR ANCESTORS back to amoeba writhing in the primordial soup SURVIVED TO ITS REPRODUCTIVE AGE, or for Creationists, back to ADAM AND EVE writhing in the Garden of Eden.  Your ancestors, whoever they were, survived mass extinctions, wars, famines, plagues and pestilence. They avoided the attentions of tyrants, torturers, serial killers, press-gangs, King Herod, Lord Kitchener, homicidal parents, uncles, siblings and wild animals.  They missed out on fatal falls from horses, Blackpool pier, the Eiger Norwand etc, at least until they had handed their genes on to the next generation.  They didn't commit suicide, contract a fatal illness, drink themselves to an early death etc etc until the gene-line that leads to YOU had moved on a generation.

How down to chance it is that we are here at all and that we are who we are!  My father (at 18 yrs) survived dreadful injuries at Arras on the Western Front in WW1 in 1916, injuries that would have killed him had the shrapnel struck an inch nearer his heart.  He lived. Married my mother.  Their first child died only a few months old. A "cot-death" or "sudden infant death syndrome." Who knows whether they would have been happy with their one little daughter, had she but survived? But they went on to "make" me.  A "replacement" for their tragic loss?  See what I mean?

As Topol says . . . "Is a puzzle!"