I never met my father's father or my mother's biological mother or the uncle for whom I was named. All died before I was born. Yet I've been thinking about them a lot lately, thanks to - of all mundane things - a couple of 1930 census forms.
There was my paternal grandfather, Patrick (Pade) Aucoin, rendered in just-the-facts bureaucratese: age 33, an immigrant from Nova Scotia, employed as a house painter and living in Waltham with my grandmother, my father (then 3 years old), another son, and a daughter. And there, on a different 1930 census form, was my maternal grandmother, Frances (Vocell) Carmichael, then living with my grandfather in Billerica. Though only 21 at the time, Frances had already had one child and was, by my calculations, pregnant with Donald, my mother's beloved older brother.
(Donald Carmichael would not live to see his 21st birthday. He would be cut down by a sniper's bullet while fighting in the Korean War. Don't you dare call it the Korean "Conflict" around my mother.)
All in all, nothing quite like scaling the family tree to make you start taking the long view.
At first, it was the little details that jumped out at me, such as the "R" next to Pade's name. According to the website Ancestry.com, which linked me to the census forms, that signified that the family owned a radio, which in 1930 was by no means universal.
The dozens of other names on the form showed that the surrounding neighborhood was largely Italian, putting my father's French-Canadian family in a distinct minority (and putting into a new context my father's memory of a school crossing guard calling out "Move along, little froggies" as he and the other French-Canadian kids prepared to cross the street).
Sooner or later - usually later - we become aware of ourselves as bit players in a multigenerational saga. We step out of the here-and-now and it hits us that one day we too will be spectral figures in dusty photo albums: the long-dead grandfather, the colorful uncle, the faintly remembered cousin. And we begin to understand that we are more than just products of this time and place, that larger historical forces are at work in making us the people we become.
For Jonathan Bohan of Jamaica Plain, the galvanizing event was the death two months ago of his great-aunt. It got Bohan, 37, thinking about her favorite refrain: "Remember who you are and remember where you came from."
After his wife got him a subscription to Ancestry.com, Bohan perused his great-grandfather's World War I registration card and learned that the man was missing two fingers, a fact unknown by anyone in his family. He's made contact with someone he's pretty sure is a third cousin, who gave him information about another part of their family. Nothing life-changing so far, but Bohan is hooked. He says he plans to keep exploring his family tree.
The aging of the baby boomers and of Gen Xers like Bohan has contributed to an upsurge of interest in genealogy, as has the election of Barack Obama, with his complicated family history. It is a lot easier today to dig up details about your ancestors because so many historical and personal records have been digitized and put online. That explains the growth of Ancestry.com, which now boasts 3.3 million members.
In the first week of January alone, as the nation awaited Obama's inauguration, more than 116,000 family trees were created on the site, a 25 percent jump over the average for the previous four weeks, and nearly 30,000 family stories were uploaded, a 68 percent increase over the previous four weeks. "In a day and age when we're so busy, and the communications we have with others are micro-communications that are so transitory, the history of our families - the historical basis for who we are - does begin to have a deeper meaning," Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com, told me.
Sullivan, whose father grew up in Lowell and whose siblings are scattered across the country, discovered that firsthand. "The day that I found my great-grandfather's Ellis Island immigration record, I was so excited," he says. "I immediately invited other members of my family to see it, this connection to this guy who was just this great, mythical giant in my family history."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 
