Fourteen Years Ago . . .

 

Fourteen years ago, this date—May 8—was a Mother's Day. I remember it well, for the day's designation didn't set well with me. My own mother had died a few years before that point, due to lingering injuries sustained in a car wreck occurring on her way to her favorite hiking spot.

While my mother was no longer with us, her legacy remained—the many family stories she had passed down in a long chain of succession to me from her relatives who had received them from ancestors before that. Those were the types of stories which would cause children's eyes to light up around campfires late at night. I still remembered them from my childhood, and I wanted a way to preserve them.

More than just the stories, though, I also wanted to seek out the missing parts of some of the other family stories—the ones where my questions didn't seem to get answered. I had questions from those childhood years, but now as an adult—and one who had learned effective search strategies, thanks to genealogy training—I was confident I could find those answers.

Over the years, thankfully, the tools available to seek out those family mysteries have made the search easier and easier. I've pushed far beyond the stories I remembered from my childhood. Now, much of what I write is an effort of breaking into new territory, exploring possibilities, testing hypotheses. But most importantly, making sure to keep writing it all down. Someone else might want to follow this trail.

Tomorrow is another day to get back to the task at hand, exploring the possible relatives of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, Lidia Miller. For today's break from the chase, I wanted to reminisce about that day fourteen years ago, when A Family Tapestry was "born."