Welcome to my blog

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 10^th, 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 100^th 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!