Happy 290th Birthday!

If we believe the majority of genealogies on the internet, then today is Joel Campbell's 290th birthday. According to most 'genealogists' he was born on January 22, 1735. (If you have read my book, you know that I am skeptical.)

There are no birth, death, or marriage certificates for Joel; no (contemporary) church records; no diary.  The date may be inaccurate, but evidence of his life in this period exists on one map, one deed, one militia muster, tax assessments, store ledgers, and census records. 

He was born a 3rd generation American in the City of New Ark, a community established in the British Colony of New Jersey by Congregationalists from Connecticut and Long Island. How Joel's grandfather joined this insular community without being related to its founding members is still a mystery.

In 2035, we will celebrate his 300th birthday.  Three hundred years does not seem like such a long time when one considers the age of the earth or the time since the last ice age. But it is enough time for just about everything to be forgotten. Did Joel have any desire to be remembered? I hope he is not offended that I am celebrating.

Did Joel think about the distant future?  Probably no more than we do.  Joel could not have envisioned a time when people traveled in steel machines and not on horses, where people wrote on screens and not on paper, where there were more salesmen than farmers, where people lived comfortably on small lots with no livestock.

Will anyone celebrate Joel's 500th birthday, two hundred years from now? It will be 2235. Will it be a time of unprecedented prosperity or a time of struggle for survival after a cataclysmic event? Will the human race predominate or will super-intelligent robots rule? Will history be more accessible or will there be a dark age after an electromagnetic pulse makes access to a totally digital history nearly impossible to retrieve? Perhaps mankind will have left for another planet where time is no longer measured in earth-years, making a 500th birthday a bit confusing to generations born on the new planet?

Today, I will celebrate the present.  I am lighting 290 candles for Joel.