Today is my Mother's Birthday

She would be 92. She was born in Nebraska to a hard scrabble life of crop failure due to drought. In 1929 the family left Nebraska and headed to Wyoming. They actually did quite well once arriving in Campbell County, WY, but she always longed to go back to her roots.

She always wanted to return to Blaine County, Nebraska, but health issues did not allow that dream. I finally gave Mom her wish in 2007 when I took some of her ashes and scattered them into the North Loup River where she played with her brothers as a child. I have since been back two more times.

Regrets, I do have them. Sadly, I started my genealogy research after Mom passed away in 2006. I did not work on my genealogy earlier as it always seemed such a "Mormon" thing to do. Because the Mormons had always dominated everything in my day to day life, to include who you could or could not date, I steered clear. There is so much I would love to share with Mom and so many questions unanswered.

Happy Birthday Miss Winnie.

I send my birthday wishes to her soul.

My Mom is still with me, and she just turned 92 at the end of May. Mom is the last surviving sibling, having had five other sisters, all of whom passed away in the last five or six years. I know what you mean about not getting into Genealogy until you feel like it is almost too late. Most of my aunts and uncles were gone before I really got into this hobby, (read "addiction.") My Grandparents were long gone, two dead before I was born. But you know what? Even if they aren't here, you can still find so many amazing stories out there about their lives. Track down every piece of information you can, and you'll find mysteries, skeletons in the closet, and unknown cousins doing the same work as you - and you'll hook up on the Internet. Make sure you have access to old newspapers. I use both Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. Ancestry has the same papers, but sometimes you can't find someone in a search on Ancestry and you can find it on NA.com, or vice versa.

Birth, death, marriage and divorce records, along with obits - you can get so much info from those papers. I searched around for almost two years to find the when, where, and why, of my Father's parents divorce. My Father, 90, is still here as well. The information I found was VERY hard for him to read. I wish I had read it alone. I would have most likely left out parts of it. Amazingly, in those records, copied so kindly by someone in Kentucky, there were three letters that were used in the courtroom as evidence. When these letters were copied for me, they only copied the envelopes the letters came in. When I saw the copies of the envelopes, I saw what appeared to be letters inside the envelopes. So I called the woman at the Archives in Kentucky, and she went back and looked, and sure enough, there WERE letters in the envelopes. She copied and mailed them to me and they put a whole new slant on the divorce of my Grandparents. This divorce was HUSH, HUSH, HUSH since 1922. And in 2008, all the secrets came out, and we found out more about my Grandparents than we ever thought we could have.

So don't give up, even if your Mom is not here to tell you the answers. You'll have to find them the hard way, but MANY of those answers are out there.
Good luck.

Miss Winnie looks like she was a wonderful woman. :)