Two weeks ago, Tim and I used the special computer down at the Brookwood Library that is dedicated to ancestry to search our family tree. Having a common last name like Adams makes it pretty challenging to search up at Tim’s family tree because there are literally hundreds of Adams, Adamses?, dotting the East Coast.

What was really easy, was looking at my ancestry because many of them had interesting and unique names. My grandma’s dad was named Absalom Urshan and his dad was named Yadgar Urshan and his mom was named Soosombar Mirza. As far as I can tell, my grandmother’s father came to the US in the early part of the 20th century. He married a Californian teacher named Hylinda Hayes when she was 34 and he was 39. I couldn’t help but laugh because I also was a teacher that got married at 34. And she was tall.

From historical records, I could see that Absalom had been born in Persia, which is now called Iran. His hometown of Urmia is on the Turkish border. The area is currently populated by Iranian Azerbaijanis, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Armenian communities. Our family branch is the Assyrian variety.

I’m talking about this right now because the US and Israel bombed Iran last week. There will be refugees of this conflict as there were refugees previous eras. People with names and families and lives are being disrupted and killed. I understand their leader was a bad person, but the people there matter too. People like you and me.