I have been doing Genealogy for
about 10 years. My Mom got me started. She was a keeper of the stories, and
boy, did she have the stories. She loved to talk…she even talked when no one
was listening, or we were only partially listening. Sounds like how my
teenagers listen today. Part of the
reason I got so into Genealogy was to have something to talk to my Mom about,
and engage her in conversation other than about her aches and pains and how she was loosing her
eyesight. It gave us both something else to focus on, and she had some interesting
family stories…at least I thought so. People couldn’t believe her age,
because she was so spunky!!
Mom
said she started collecting family info when she was little. I did the same in
a way, cataloging things in my mind, and on paper. Luckily, she wrote a lot
down, and did a lot of research later on. She started putting it all on the
computer in the mid 1990’s using Personal Ancestral File, or PAF. She submitted
info to One World Tree. When she started losing her eyesight, I took over.
We lost
Mom on October 10th, 2011. She was 93 years young, and lived a very
full life. At the end, she had a series
of strokes that took her ability to communicate away. She could talk, but it
wasn’t meaningful conversation, and while they sometimes were complete
sentences, they often didn’t make sense. She refused to eat much, because she
didn’t want to be the way she was, and didn’t want to be in a nursing home. She
got weaker, and lost her ability to walk due to the weakness, and losing
muscle strength. A vicious circle.
|
Lois Jane Flynn, about 9 years old |
I miss
being able to pick up the phone and talk to her, or to answer her phone calls, even
if it was to explain how to use the TV remote for the 100th time! Lately
I have been making some discoveries in our Family History, and each time, my
immediate thought was I wanted to share it with Mom. I would usually do that, call
her and tell her my latest discovery. Now that I can’t do that, I have decided
to write about it. It is my way of telling Mom my discoveries. I think she
would like that!