Ancestral Musings

I am just barely making it in under the wire here on week 12 of the #52ancestors challenge:  Popular.  What direction to take this?  The most colorful of my ancestors seem to have been un popular.  Popular names seem to have followed the trends of the day (except for that surfeit of Cecils and Cecilias.  What were they all thinking?).  But one thing I had not expected when I started researching family members with the help of DNA was the popularity of this test with the Howdeshell side of the family. My father's mother was Olive Gertrude Howdeshell.  There are (or were) a number of Howdeshell cousins that I never met who appeared for my father's memorial service, much to the surprise of my sister who had no idea that these people existed.  (I was not able to be there, but I spent time with Dad before he died.)  Why Dad had never kept up with these cousins is still a mystery but the fact is the Howdeshells were a pretty numerous family as my...

I'm a week behind:  due to the world's bad luck in the emergence of this coronavirus, leading to COVID-19, I got a little distracted.  But life will in fact go on and I want to continue to do the challenge so I'll be catching up this week. Luck.  I must admit that most of the ancestors that I know anything about had their fair share of bad luck, but I'm going to talk about the tragedy my late mother-in-law, Edith Doerflinger, experienced that turned out to be good luck for her. Edith's mother Margaret Kober died at the age of 37 of what we think was uterine cancer.  She died in 1932, having had four children, the first, George, having died at 8 months.  Edith was 7, her brother John must have been about 12, and her little sister Dorothy (Dotty) was about 6. Her father Charles was left with three young children to raise.  Though this was during the Great Depression, he was actually pretty prosperous, with a house, a car, and a telephone Edith told me....

These are always challenging and this time I think I've already written about the strongest women in my line, at least those I know anything about.  I know from the evidence that some of the women who seem a little quieter (not weaker) just didn't leave behind much record of their lives or preferred not to talk about it.  My mother, for instance, always insisted that the past was past, it was over, and there was no point in speaking of it.  Having had to delve into some medical questions, I can tell you that that is definitely not true! So, I'm kind of reduced to speaking about myself.  Maybe this is cheating a little, but I wish that some of the women in my line had left something behind so I could understand them.  This may be my gift to my descendants.   I'm not sure I'm strong, just willing to keep moving, but I will let you judge. Just over fifteen years ago, we lost our son Thomas, a soldier who had been deployed to Iraq with a Stryker Brigade Com...