We sit round the table. A garçon comes and gives to me and my father each a menu. I see over my father's shoulders next to us some customers are paying another garçon the bill. They talk about something I cannot hear and their gestures convinces me there is something about tipping. I think to myself if my father tips at restaurants. Considering this is not a high class place, but rather ordinary, they should not get tips; It is uncommon in Iran to tip. Though some do, like me, and at some places you must tip. I take my eyes back to the menu. And we order.

We have already spent an hour with each other, and then me and my father came here for lunch. Afterwards we will separate, and I tell to myself I would meet him at noroze again.

So at the table, to start conversation and killing another bird with that stone, I ask him, I ask him something that for my whole life I wondered about, but it never happened to me to ask, about my father's family. I had never meet someone from my father's side of the family. I ask him straight-forward and know he would answer me immediately. So does he. He tells me about his brothers and sisters. When he left home. And as much about everybody's news as he said he knew. Although most of these news were decades old.

Despite all my curiosity I keep the conversation at a comfortable level. I tell him I would love to hear more another time.

Knowing your own family history is about finding out where you have come from. Perhaps you are different, but in my situation I do feel how hundreds of years has spanned to up right this minute to make me what I am, what I have and how I feel. I did not know this is the case for many, many other people.

It is now about four or five years that I have been interested in investigating my mother's side of family. First fact to tempt me into this course was the appealing name and history of the grandparents of my mother. During these years my desire needed to wait until about months ago, when I offered to a lecturer, I had class with, to bring him a short but useful review on someone from our family. Someone he was interested in knowing more about.

Taking this self-offered homework, I started asking people around me, more about our history. I needed to clear things I had heard of. I needed to count and name all my relatives, especially those alive. I needed to ask each proposed fact from several people, because once a person has found her way into history, aside from the different views she would get from different persons, details tend to be inaccurate.

In our family history there are many old pictures, but also many lost pictures, I wished I had access to. During my search I found people, whom I am yet to meet, who are going to be my great resources of information for the parts of the family I am far from, or for my own closer acquaintances whom I need a more exterior view about them; sometimes you need a colleague's opinion of a person, in addition to that of his children.

I searched through the Web and was astonished by the number of relevant Web sites on what is called "genealogy." There were trial family tree software, Web sites of free search for census and family records by governments, family trees that were mostly empty, family trees with roots deep back to 1700, and very amusing pages for found pictures; like for a portrait someone has found in street which may bear a date or not.

For my family, I can see now partly through ages, through at least quarters, how everybody is whom I know: The ups and downs, disasters, successes, fame, fall, love, death, courage and weaknesses, and the decisions that made my history.

Now, not only I am to learn more about my past, by visiting old ladies, distant relatives, strangers who knew them, I would have never seen otherwise, by listening to my grandma's old, repeated stories and tales about who is buried where and who loved whom, but also I add to my list my father's family name, a new topic to discuss, to notice, to care about and to hear about.