One of the more popular online search sites is “Ancestry.com” – a genealogy site designed to enable people to research their family trees. With the ever-increasing stockpile of electronic information online, it is becoming easier and easier to find out more about our ancestors than just their names and dates of birth and death. Where they lived, what they did, whom they knew, is suddenly at our fingertips, giving a truer, more flesh-and-blood picture of our ancestral family.

While both Matthew and Luke offer lengthy genealogies for Jesus, only Luke’s gospel fleshes out the picture of Jesus’ family life with the personal details found in Luke 2 - you might call these details “leaves” to fill out Jesus’ family tree. Luke’s text describes a family journey to Jerusalem that was undertaken to …