Great-grandfather? "We had none...the line failing before it had reached so far back."

In a Mark Twain novel*, the protagonist is trying to gather data for forming armies, one of them specifically for the nobility (to keep them out of other people's hair.)  He asks each candidate about his forbears. "Father?"  Then "grandfather?"...then "great-grandfather?"  When he gets to that question with one guy, the fellow explains, "We had none...the line failing before it had reached so far back".  (The interviewer gave up!)
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It's interesting how genealogies can start at either end, depending on the situation and culture.  In the Bible, the "begats" always start with the founder of the clan or tribe and work downward.  The sequence of ancestors gets named and placed as they appeared on the vertical  family timeline.  It finally ends up with the person whose line is being reported.

Nowadays, when we want to explore our lineage, we begin with ourselves and work backwards.  It's close to impossible for us to do it the historic way, since there are few records that go back so far, and there are no bards around to recite the lengthy generation-after-generation records they had memorized.
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It's fun to know what kinds of ancestors we had and where they came from,  but there's something that's much  more important to me.  That is my spiritual lineage.  As long as I know who my Father is, I have an identity.  I am part of His history, I am a member of His family.

"But You are our Father...You, O Lord, are our Father..."  (Isaiah 62:16)

"Have we not all one Father?  Did not God create us all?"  (Malachi 2:10)

""For in Him we live and move and have our being.  As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring'.  There is one body and one Spirit...one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."  (Ephesians 4:4-6)
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Tomorrow I will travel with my husband to have a much-looked-forward-to visit with our descendants.  Our two children, their spouses and their offspring are precious to us.  They "belong".  We all "belong" to our family.  But even better, we all belong to God's family...we all call Him Father!
                                            
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*A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court