A Full Circle of Mother's Days

Exactly today, five years ago on May 8, just so happened to also be a Mother's Day. I should know, for it was leading up to that date that I decided to do something a bit different to commemorate the event: start a blog about my mother's family history. After all, she came from a family which had a good three hundred years' worth of that history, just in this country—including enough stories to fill a blog for untold hundreds of posts.

I decided to launch my project on Mother's Day, 2011. I thought that might be a nice touch.

Of course, I couldn't just limit the blog to my mother's family history. I had to include a few pages on my father's mysterious origins, as well.

It wasn't long after that when family on both sides of our happy marriage chimed in. "Oh, you're researching that? Well, maybe you would be interested in this stuff," they would say, handing me a stack of old letters. Or documents. Or photographs. "We don't know who those people are, but maybe you do."

A mere 1,829 posts later, and we wind up on another May 8. And, likewise, it happens to be Mother's Day. Just like that. Where did the time go?

In the meantime, I've touched on the stories belonging to eighty four surnames in our families' combined genealogies—but have barely scratched the surface of what's out there. A genealogist's job is never done.

Although my mother has now been gone for a few years, I can't help but think of her and remember some of the stories she used to tell about her memories from her growing-up years, of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and others I've never met, when I sit down to write another post for this project once launched on another May 8—a Mother's Day, five years ago.