Roots
All my life I heard from my aunt and also from my grandmother on the other side that we were descended from English aristocracy. As a child, I didn't much care about that. Actually I still don't care about that. The era when having a royal blood line was important, well those times are gone. As history will bear witness, people in royal families were every bit as human as everyone else.
I suppose it is all those years of hearing them talk about our family history that got me interested at an early age. Grandma was always working on "the book" which never was completed. Our aunt had the "black trunk" which contained old letters, money from the Civil War era, and other keepsakes of our family. All these things went to the back of my mind as I married, worked, raised children and went about the daily things of life. Not until Mom passed away, did we discover that she was the keeper of the items from "black trunk" and papers for "the book" (or what remained of them anyway). My sister and I also had some of the family heirlooms that Mom passed along to us when they moved and downsized several years before her passing. So when we put together all these treasures, we have 12 very large plastic tote boxes full of stuff!
2010 Celebration of Life
After Mom passed away, we decided to have a COL for her and Dad, and for her sister and brother, none of whom had a memorial service at the time of their passing. All were cremated, so no funerals were held. To prepare for the COL, we started going through all the boxes of stuff we had, pulling out things to display and share at the COL.
This was healing for us. We reminisced, we laughed, and we cried together as we remembered and shared stories as we came across old photos and memorabilia. We found love letters that Dad wrote to Mom during WWII. Those were really special and we had no idea they existed. Neither of our parents ever said anything about them. We found letters from the late 1800's written by our maternal grandmother to her brother. We found copies of wills from the middle 1800's and old black and white photos of our dad's mom and her family growing up in the wilds of West Texas at the turn of the century. What a treasure trove for us!
The COL was great and most of our family came as well as the children of close friends of our parents and several of our close friends.. It was a small gathering but important for a family that doesn't "do funerals" or "do reunions". We will have another COL in future for our brother who passed just two years after Mom.
The Journey Begins
So that is what started our journey to chronicle the family history. After the COL, we looked at all those boxes and said, "What next?" We continued to organize, scan and index the documents, letters, photos and other things we came across. We began to read about how to best preserve some of these things, as many of ours were already suffering years of being in a box with little care taken. This blog is not really about "how to" genealogy although I will include some posts about the processes we use and why.
This blog is really about an amazing discovery made along the way. We have found so many people in our family tree what were strong people of Christian faith, both clergy and lay leaders in the Body of Christ. This theme keeps coming up, over and over. That really struck me as something I knew, but then didn't really consciously realize how many there were or what a long time span they represent. So I want to tell their stories, as much as I can put together here so that all our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will know that their ancestors gave them the most important inheritance you can give: a Legacy of Faith.
