Via Post Prandial:

A century and a half from now, there will be no-one who remembers first-hand what you were like. You will exist to your family (who will be large and many branched by then) as faint traces from the past, appearing only randomly in whatever mementoes sheer luck and institutional planning have created. While scientists continue to work on understanding probabilities of disease and predilections in our double helices, a simple name is the visible DNA that anyone can trace and interpret. A family name is the marker. The context in which it appears is the story it tells us.

Read the whole thing, and you'll get an appreciation for just how transient our appearance on the globe really is. The now seems really important to us, but it seemed equally so to our forebearers - and most of them left very hazy footprints. I have some second hand (via my mother) recollections of her father, and I remember both of my grandmothers - but beyond that - it's all mist.