Climbing Our Family Tree

The prompt for "The Old Homestead" in this writing series had me a little stymied. When you do family history research, you naturally tend to focus on people and their lives. Their comings and goings are part of your consciousness. They live in an area, and then they move away or pass away, and leave very little behind them. I've come across a few interesting folks in my research that have had family living in the same house and on the same land for 300 years. But I've never come across that in my own family. Whether it was because of a wandering spirit ... the kind that shaped this country as it grew ... or whether it was just hard times, it seems like our family was always moving. Moving from one house to another, or one town to another, or one state to another. So I was having a hard time coming up with anything that I tend to think of as an old "homeplace". Still, there were houses I knew of that were in pictures and had a place in the mental storybook...

Every life has its ups and downs. Moments of joy and moments of pain and despair. And when the hard times come, sometimes it seems like they come in clusters. The old adage suggests that "they happen in threes", but that isn't really the case. I think we only see it that way because were trying to find some kind of pattern ... to make some kind of sense of it all ... in order to keep ourselves going forward. We want to be able to believe that the worst is over now because we've hit that magical "three", or whatever else. Some people's lives seem to have more than their fair share of crisis moments. I've seen that several times in my family history research, especially in my husband's family tree. I don't know that his family is any more prone to hard times than anyone else, but it may manifest itself that way because of how and where they lived and worked. Many of my husband's family members have almost literally grown up in the coal ...

Maybe it's because it was the week of St. Patrick's Day. The writing prompt for the week was "Lucky", and I was having a hard time coming up with something to write about. There weren't any front-page-news lucky moments that I knew of in the family tree ... no major sweepstakes wins or escapes from mortal peril (although ANY of the military veterans in our tree might qualify in that regard, I suppose). So what to write about? As I got to thinking more about it, I got to thinking about the people I felt lucky to have in my life, and why. Perhaps, if luck is simply a happy accident of circumstances turning out in your favor, then how our lives are affected by the people around us, both ordinary and extraordinary, is lucky in itself. We don't get to choose the families we are born into, but being fortunate in the family you have is a lucky thing indeed. And so I thought of my Grandfather Glenn. He has been gone from us for almost 15 years, and yet his presenc...

So what makes a strong woman? Ask a dozen different people, and you'll probably get just as many answers. I think women are made strong by design, truthfully. We were created to be supportive. We love richly, feel deeply, and tend to protect the people we care about like a mother bear. Our bodies go through enormous changes and incredible amounts of stress and pain just to bring a child into the world, and yet many of us choose to do it more than once. Strength is, to some extent, built into who we are. Sometimes as you're researching family tree, you see glimpses of strength in the women of the family that are hidden in the facts of their everyday lives. I have lots of women like that in my tree, and I am always looking for ways to try and learn more about them. One ancestor raised more than 20 children, and all but one of them were hers. One ancestor raised all of her own children, and then proceeded to raise a number of her grandchildren when circumstances didn't allow...

When the writing prompt came up for this week (see title), I thought about the kind of will someone leaves when they die. (That might be interesting!) Then I thought about the determination of ancestors who have overcome incredible obstacles and kept going. (Always worth writing about!) And then I thought about my family's tendency to take a word that means one thing, and change it so that it means something totally different. Case in point: We can't seem to ever get through a movie that has the line, "Fire at will!" in a battle scene, because someone always asks, "Which one is Will?" So, I decided to write about a Will in our family tree. Partly because it was a little different, and partly because he's actually one of the folks in the family tree I've gathered a fair amount of information about. In this particular case, I suppose the end of that writing prompt would be something along the lines of "Where there's a Will, there's (even...

The writing prompt for week 8 is "Heirloom", and I'm finding this to be a bit of a challenge. (Are you sensing a theme here? It seems like a lot of these writing prompts are challenging!) It's not a difficult subject because I don't own any heirlooms ... rather it's a difficult subject because I have so many things, and they each are things I consider heirlooms. Perhaps it is because I am a self-appointed family historian. Perhaps it is because I tend to be rather sentimental. But I tend to hold onto family items that feel to me as if they just ooze history. Some are simple everyday items. Some are special because of the events they are tied to. Some are special because I love them and the memories connected to them, even if they are more recent than "historical". They are all things that bring me a quiet joy, just because of their existence in my life. For instance, in the category of simple everyday items, I have these things. The doll bel...