ACT English Practice Test 37

Finding My Family Tree

As a boy, I was fortunate to have a close family, all living in the same town. I saw my grandparents often, and they’d tell me story after story of a past world and of the people who dwelled in it . Q1

In one summer night Q2 I strolled through a thicket with my grandfather, picking up leaves and sticks along the way. Sometimes I knew from which tree they had fallen, but my grandpa happily gave me hints for most of them. Q3 Bit by bit, he told me a story about from where he and his family had come and the acres of woods he had explored as a boy. My grandfather’s immediate family came from Quebec; his distant relatives hailed from France. Q4 He always wanted to take me to his hometown near Q5 Montreal, but we hadn’t yet had the opportunity. The woods in French Canada, he said, were hearty and old, all of, Q6 the trees were the regrowth from widespread logging over a century ago. Quebec has a lot of maples, too, and Grandpa explained how his mother knew how to boil the sap just slowly enough to make syrup.

When we came in from our walk, Grandpa would take out one of his dusty shoeboxes from the cellar and sit down next to me. Q7 It amazes me how I’ve never seen the same shoebox emerge twice from the attic; his family records are astounding. In the dusty box were old sepia photographs of family members going about their daily business. Q8 My great-grandmother was pictured having kneaded Q9 dough in the kitchen.

These edges Q10 were splitting on a photograph of boys skating on a pond, hockey sticks raised in celebration of a goal. One by one, I felt the emotion captured by these images, and I got the nagging feeling that I would never know these people from my family’s past. After that day, I often joined my grandpa to learn about my French-Canadian ancestry, so that, when he is gone, I will be the custodian of the stories.

The culmination of our time together was a detailed family tree, its base formed by our French, ancestors who Q11 first arrived on this continent. Our search for information uncovered amazing historical documents, as Q12 ships’ manifests and handwritten marriage certificates.

If you were lucky, Q13 we’d find more than just a name. Dates recognizing births and deaths were fairly easy to find; occupations and bits of ancestors’ life stories became increasing difficult Q14 to uncover as we dug deeper into the past. Now, though, we’re preserving this history so that our progeny may learn from these stories and take comfort in knowing that, though life may end, photos capture history very well. Q15