Legacies

I was thinking about permanence the other day. Most people think their kids are their legacy to the world, but in terms of one's own, personal legacy, most of us are irrelevant, unless we go down in the annals of history for some famous, or infamous deed, or built something important and permanent.

Even your kids aren't the legacy many think they are - who can even name their great grandparents, never mind about great-great-grandparents? A family name too can easily die out by having only female progeny. Family names that remain are only the result of an unbroken male line since family names started, so there must be hundreds of thousands of family names that have disappeared from the record. More so now we're all having fewer children due to improved mortality.

Gravestones are a lasting legacy, but they only exist for a couple of hundred years before becoming illegible, and the penchant these days is for cremation, rather than burial.

My lasting legacy is this house we built which, given its position, should be here for 3 or 4 hundred years - possibly more. I should arrange a plaque, preferably an inscription on one of the oak beams, giving some basic information on date of construction and the names of those responsible.

There again, given the fact it has a considerable plot of land attached to it, someone may buy it in years to come, demolish it and build a small housing estate on it.