Climbing Our Family Tree

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...