My poor, long-suffering husband

I frequently refer to my beloved as "my poor, long-suffering husband". He has earned that title, bless his heart, by putting up with me and my quirks. (We have decided to call them "amusing", by the way). I post baby pictures of him on Facebook -- and I tag him so that it's not only on my newsfeed, it's on his!

 

 I frequent burst into song, and in the interest of full disclosure, The Lord did not bless me with the gift of song, not that it stops me. What's worse, my musical genre of choice is Broadway musicals, so I frequently channel my inner Julie Andrews, singing in the mountains of Austria.  I don’t share his love of football or camping or his bucket-list desire to buy an RV and travel around the country and attend a baseball game at every major and minor league stadium in the United States.  And let’s be honest, what 50 year old man should live in a house that has Winnie The Pooh displayed on just about every horizontal surface.  I even put a Pooh sticker on his cell phone case.  Yeah, I think all of those would grant him the title of long-suffering.  But now it’s worse.

I have discovered genealogy.

Not only is it not an inexpensive hobby for me to have settled upon, unless you share the bug, it’s rather tedious to others.  When we would go to Kentucky and visit his grandparents

 

I would listen to them tell stories of their family, their history, their past.  She would show me some of the old family photographs

 

and I was hooked.  Several years ago, she asked me if I could go online and look up some records on her parents / grandparents.  I started working on her family tree and that got me started.  Since I was unofficially dubbed the family historian, I was gifted with all of her photos and documents she had saved.  90 years of memories, all given to me.  I was delighted and began to scan the pictures.  Sadly, some of them are unlabeled so I don’t know who they are

 

 

 but most of them I am able to identify, with the help of my father in law and my poor, long-suffering husband. 

He listens to me as I go on and on about this relative and that relative – he even pays enough attention that he can, sometimes, respond appropriately … “Now was that George’s mother?” … but for the most part, he’s just indulging me by listening and nodding at the appropriate time.

He doesn’t even blink any more when I tell him I found a long-lost cousin.  (And by “cousin”, I mean a third cousin with whom he shares a common ancestor four generations ago).  And when I make him listen to a detailed explanation of exactly HOW he and this new cousin are related (“Your great-grandmother was the sister of his great-grandfather”) he pretends like he both cares and is interested.

While I love having the photos and the marriage/birth/death records of these ancestors, what I really want to know is WHO these people were.  What did they think?  What were their personalities like?  I tend to fill in the blanks with my over-active imagination, but when you find a record for an ancestor who gave birth to 15 children, but only 9 lived to adulthood, you have to wonder.  What kind of strength did it take to bury six children, all before their 5^th birthday?  And what was it like raising nine (9!) children?  Did the dads play with their kids?  Watch them sleep?  Were they good, decent husbands and fathers or were they jerks?  Were the women content and happy, or were they resentful that they spent their teen years married and having babies?

And there were some particular characters that I’d love to get more info on.  The one who had a wife (and a bunch of kids) living on one farm and had his mistress (and a bunch of kids) living on the adjacent farm.  Really?  I would love to know more about that.

And I think that’s why I started this blog … because one day, maybe, 100 years from now, my descendants will read this and know that I was obsessed with Pooh, loved to sing (even tho I sang badly), loved my children, my (poor, long-suffering) husband and my Lord with all my heart and passion.  And that their great-great-grandfather was a poor, long-suffering husband, who found his wife’s quirks amusing.  That’s a gift I wish I had from those long-gone ancestors. 
And I also feel that it’s my obligation, my duty, to keep their names alive.  Even tho I don’t know much about them, I feel a responsibility to see to it that their lives are at least noted and documented somewhere.

And when that involves us going to Swink, Oklahoma to find the grave of Old George (why DID George move from Kentucky to Oklahoma, anyway?  I don’t know!  But as my husband says, “Wouldn’t YOU leave Kentucky if you had the chance?”  LOL) then my poor, long-suffering husband gasses up the car, and off we go to Swink.

And if, in 100 years, this blog still remains in some format, and technology hasn’t progressed so far that an internet blog is so old-school that it can’t be accessed, and if my great-great-grandchildren stumble upon this, I hope they know a little about me and the kind of people they come from.  And if they ARE reading this, 100 years from now, I hope you have the (literally, no exaggeration) 1,800 photos that I inherited that started this whole genealogical adventure for me.  I want you to know you come from a long line of fascinating, interesting people. 

I love you, future great-great-grandchildren.  Even tho I don't know you, I promise you that I love you and that I am praying for you even now, 100 years before you're born.  And I hope that, somewhere in your futuristic, space-pod, Jetson-style house, you have a Winnie the Pooh coffee mug that has been passed down through the generations, inherited from me.  And I hope you find it quirkily amusing.