MY LINEAGE research is currently at the forefront of my interest, and with the information and photographs compiled over the years, I’m creating posts of my familial lines, one ancestor at a time. I also manage 8,000+ pages of ancestors and kin on Find A Grave. Why? I imagine it stems from when my family imploded and scattered like a fall of Pick-Up Stix; I came away with the notion that if it’d been up to me, I’d have kept us together. With the family memoir and stories I’ve written, and my genealogy research and work, I’ve done that—and then some. I’ve completed my Chatfield and Chamberlin lines, and after a nearly two-year hiatus, finished the Sevenau line, my sons’ paternal heritage. It was a bit of a rabbit hole, but most interesting! My Clemens heritage (my father’s ancestors) is now in the queue.
“What is important is not merely that we record history, or that we understand it from a seemingly objective perspective. What matters is that we take it personally, that we own it in the deepest part of ourselves, that we might solidify its power where it is something to be proud of and try to transform it where it is not.” ~Marianne Williamson
Along with working on my genealogy, I’ve penned three books, Through Any Given Door (a family memoir posted here on my website), Queen Bee: Reflections on Life and Other Rude Awakenings (published stories I’ve compiled over the years), and Passages from Behind These Doors: A Family Memoir (20 chapters from the full memoir, published in both book and audio). These frank, funny, and tender tales are about sin and prayer, good intentions and unattended sorrows… and about finding our way back home. Each has a link for those interested.
Through Any Given Door, sketches and vignettes strung along a timeline well before I came along, ends with the death of my mother shortly after I turned twenty. It’s a tale that transformed the holes created by chaos and heartache in our family into a sense of wholeness, and from that wholeness, a holiness occurred. It also connected me to an assemblage of Clemens, Chatfield, Chamberlin, and Hoy families and ancestors. I’ve come to know us, to see our strands are woven in the same translucent web, and knowing if not for them, I would not be here.
A THOUGHT FOR YESTERDAY: One of my greatest gifts was to be born into a troubled family. I don’t have to go looking for stories, they’re handed to me on a silver platter.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: The story of our life isn’t our life, it’s simply our story.
A THOUGHT FOR TOMORROW: “We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.” Being Wrong ~Kathryn Schulz