Who knew that looking up your relatives and doing family history could be so exciting. I guess to some people they are just names and dates, but I have found recently that they are much, much more than that. I have started compiling as much as I can from DH's side of the family onto my family tree at ancestry.com. This started out as a way to kind of get an idea of where he came from , and to get the piles of different information into once location. Well, the other day I was showing my family tree to DH's dad, who has not historically been all that interested in his family history.
As we began looking at some of the pictures I had found, he began talking. Come to find out he has BOXES of pictures of different members of his family. Pictures I had assumed just simply didn't exist. Like his Grandmother
Wilhemina Menke, or his other Grandmother Sadie Brown. I was like a kid in a candy store. He let me bring some home, and I have scanned bunches of them. They are terrific pictures, well preserved as far as content, and so indicative of the different time periods, that even if you don't know who they are, they are just cool to look at. The one of the little boy on the chair is actually DH's grandfather, Richard Wright Sr. when he was probably about 3. The framed woman is
Wilhemina Menke, DH's great-grandmother whose family came from Germany. She went by Minnie.
The woman feeding the bird is Sarah Theresa Brown, who went by Sadie. She was married to Jessie Wright, who is the tall man with the cocked hat standing next to Richard Wright Sr. as a teenager. Suddenly these people have faces and lives, and stories to be told. It always seemed sad to me in a way that these people lived their whole lives, and all I had to show for it was a couple of dates. They lived, they worked, they sacrificed. What were they like? Jessie
apparently was a great orator, who charmed large audiences at political rallies he held the field near his Jacksonville home.
Sadie was from a well-known family, almost aristocratic you could say, with senators and confederate soldiers.
Wilhemina was one of 14 children, and she had six of her own, one of whom was DH's paternal grandmother, Ida Belle. And Richard Sr., who went by Dick, was a hunter and fisher extraordinaire. He was even recognized in a famous hunting magazine for a buck he shot in South Carolina.
I find that the more I continue to look into the lives of these amazing people who have lived before me, the more I appreciate the lives that they lived. There have been things that I have discovered that have given me a deeper understanding of how people aren't perfect, but they do the best they can, and they hope their children live a better life than they did. And by and large, we manage to do just that by learning from their mistakes and their triumphs. What better way to honor our
forebearers than that. I'm proud of my family history. Sure, there are skeletons in a few closets, and there have been surprises along the way. But not once has my respect for these people ever wavered. On the contrary, I find that the more I see who they were, (and I mean the real person, not the glossed over summary, but the every day life person) the more I am in awe of what they accomplished. How blessed we are to be able to learn from the lives of our families who have gone before. I only wish I could find more.
The moral of this story: Write a journal. Tell your children who you are and were. I would kill for a journal by my grandma Lilly, or from any one of the other amazing people it has been my
privilege to call ancestors. I won't let my grandchildren feel that way about me. I may not be perfect, but I try to be a little better each day. Maybe by the time my
grandkids come around, they can learn from my example too.
She was all excited when we bought the special shoes, and got her the 
