LOVE of family

I found LOVE to be a difficult topic to write about. My first thought was about romantic LOVE. I thought I might select a couple and write about their courtship & marriage; their enduring LOVE. But it was difficult to select just one couple. Should I write about my parents who met as teenagers when they went to a square dance? Should I write about my mother’s parents who were married twice, to each other? Or should I write about my father’s grandparents who wrote love letters to each other? There are quite a few LOVE stories to chose from and I cannot select just one.

Then I thought about my parents and what they taught us about LOVE. They taught my brothers & I to LOVE our family. They taught us through their actions. Every happy occasion in the family was shared with grandmothers, uncle & aunts, and cousins. We shared birthdays, holidays and graduations. But we did not need big occasions to share our time together. 

A beautiful autumn day was a good occasion to have a barbeque. Once a thunderstorm rolled through during a family barbeque. My father and our Uncle Leo stood outside at the grill, flipping hamburgers. They wore ponchos in the downpour and never stopped cooking for us.  Why? Because they loved our family. 

A warm summer day was a good occasion to go swimming. I remember many times my mother and our aunts cooked up and packed up big bowls of salads to take to a park or campground where we could spend the day together. They spread tablecloths on picnic tables and unpacked piles of food. We had a wonderful time as a result of all their hard work. Why? Because they loved our family.

In both happy times & hard times our family stuck together. My parents did not give us big lectures on the importance of family. Their actions showed us how much they loved our family. Today we still band together to celebrate happy occasions & lend a hand when needed. 

It is that LOVE of family that motivates me to spend hours and hours on genealogy. Learning about our family helps me to feel connected to those who are no longer with us and to those are. Learning and sharing helps me feel connected to those family members who are spread across the country and to those who are close by. To me, genealogy is about LOVE of family. 

Amy Johnson Crow challenges us to remember our ancestors and their families through this task: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. I completed ’52 Ancestors’ in 2014 & here I go again. This post is in response to that challenge. The topic for this week is ‘LOVE'.