I haven't done much genealogy lately, which has apparently impacted my creativity. I've been fretting and worrying about the blog so I guess I'll just offer some updates and hope for the best in the near future.
First of all, our little Shea went missing over a month ago and we now
believe she's using the Litter Box in the Sky. She was Jim's cat and
was especially fond of him. She would be very antsy when he was gone
and quite contented in his lap every night. She was a birthday gift to
Jim and he named her appropriately. Now both his favorite Sheas are
gone.
I spent some quality time with the Kilmurray children recently, which was a blast for me. We went over to Austin Lincoln (it's been AGES since I've been there) and explored on foot with our cameras nearby. I came home with about 700 pictures and videos taken by Delaney and Breyen. Here are a couple:
We had a great day. I was also able to get to Breyen's football game this week. Go B-Man!
I also had a couple of interesting "Pay it Forward" experiences in the
last few weeks. There's a Facebook initiative to Pay it Forward that I
decided to try and it was an interesting exercise. You promise to send
off a little token of remembrance to the Facebook friends that agree to
give it a try. Some of my Facebook friends that agreed are people I
know well and see often. A couple are not and those were the ones I
found to be intriguing. I took the opportunity to stop and think of
these people carefully in ways I don't generally. I found little tokens
to send off that I think will appeal to their interests and
personalities. No pressure (like with Christmas) and no timeline
(ditto). I liked taking time to think of those that don't often come
right to mind. Then these friends are supposed to offer the same out to
their Facebook friends. It's a neat way to spread a little kindness.
The other experience took a bit longer to come to fruition. Quite a
while ago, I bought a small bunch of ephemera at an auction that
included personal items like letters and pictures. I had promised
myself that someday I would reunite such memorabilia to remaining family
members, and these items seemed to be good candidates. I carefully
reviewed the items, taking note of names and dates then did some
research to see if I could find this family online. It seemed there
were 2-3 potential family members with tress on Ancestry.com for whom
this might be valuable material. I wasn't sure how to proceed picking
the family to whom I would offer these items first so I responded in the
time honored tradition of putting it away to think about later.
Several months later ( and within the time since the last blog post), I
renewed these efforts and decided to select the family tree that seemed
to be best documented. I contacted the tree owner to offer to send the
items along and apparently picked absolutely the correct person. The
items seem to belong to her grandfather. This woman believes she is the
only living descendant of this man and she was very pleased to agree to
accept the items. So off they went! I know how happy I would be and
was glad to be able to bring that joy to someone else.
Perhaps the good karma will open the creative gates for me in the near future. Thanks for hanging in here with the blog.
