How it started

 Sometime ago my sister embarked on a journey to discover her other family. You see, she was my mother's daughter by mother's second marriage. And though Dad adopted her and raised her as his own, at some point she decided he wasn't her "real" father.

You may not be surprised to know this was a bone of contention with Mother. I gather Mother didn't think much of her second husband and resented my sister's attitude, given that Dad had been the one to do all the dad lifting through most of sis's life.

Sis joined Ancestry.com after Dad's death and began researching, eventually finding her biological father's family, though by then he had died. She made contact with them and visited with them at least a couple of times.

This led to a rift that wasn't crossed until years later when Mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. After Mother's death some six months later, we packed up Mother's stuff, and Sis took it back home to sort and sell because neither of us lived in the town Mother did. Sis was an empty nester, and I wasn't, so the arrangement worked out well enough. 

Sis sent me quite a number of items Mother had collected from my childhood, along with some photo albums and quite a bit of the genealogical research she'd done. I glanced over the papers, noted some interesting bits of family lore, and packed it all away, to be moved from places to place until we alighted in our present home.

Fast forward a few decades,  and my daughter contacted me with questions about our origins. I told her what I thought I remember being told, which was not particularly helpful, and then dug out the long-stored information. She used that to help in building a history on Family Tree, the website run by the Latter Day Saints. 

Once she found and entered the appropriate information, the site filled in a family tree from the work others have done. This has led me down a rabbit hole to the past, my own family's past and the broader history our past is part of.

I intend this blog to be a way of giving me a reason to write again and to share the stories I discover as I climb my family tree. You're welcome to come along.