Firefly Creations

I love to listen to the stories my dad has to tell about growing up.  The stories are especially entertaining when my dad and his brother, Vaughn, get together.  There were 10 kids growing up in the hills south of Stover, Missouri and times were incredibly hard.  I doubt there were many (if any) families as poor as they were but the stories told are always full of love and laughter, never complaints about what they didn't have or how hard the kids worked to help make ends meet.

How does a family come to be like this?  Where did they come from?  What are their roots?  Family history has always interested me so I joined one of the on-line ancestry sites and started looking.  It has been frustrating and enlightening, fun and down-right maddening.  Some lines are just dead-ends and one line goes back to the 1300's.  The frustrating part is that you can see where they came from, when they were born and died but not much else.  What did they do?  What brought them to the new country as immigrants?  Why did they end up in Missouri and what was it like to get there?

I still have 6 months on my membership so maybe I can find out a little more.  I found one ancestor who graduated from Oxford.  So how did we get from there to hillbillies in Missouri with barely grade-school educations?  I found several Catherine's in the past.  There was a Solomon, an Abel, Cain, several named after presidents, lots of male names passed on several times and my favorite name of all--Jerusha.  Jerusha Titus to be exact.  I don't know who she was but I love the name.

Now believe me, my comment about having only a grade-school education was not meant as a put-down.  Education didn't mean as much then as it does now.  Back then, the only thing that mattered was working hard.  My dad and one brother were carpenters.  One brother worked for the railroad.  The sisters raised families that are good people and did it based on the values they learned while growing up.  I have never come across a family that helped each other more than this family.  Calls are made on a weekly basis and on every birthday.  My aunts and uncles (and for the most part, their spouses) always say "I love you" every chance they get.  AND THEY MEAN IT!! 

There are only two brothers and one sister left now.  For the past three years we have had a family reunion at my house.  Cousins come, we laugh at the stories still being told, sing lots of gospel songs (yes, they play guitar and sing too--probably from their Pentecostal upbringing), and we have a wonderful time.  I love them and am proud of them.  Who came before doesn't really matter--it's who we are now that I enjoy and love.