Family Matters

Our typical weekend usually includes fitting 4 hockey practices in 2 days, in 2 of 3 potential rinks between a city and a town. Sounds like a blast right? Add a couple of birthday parties in there, 100 loads of laundry (ok, slight exageration….only slight though) aaaaaaaaaand a school project that includes tracing our family tree as far back as we can go.

This school project came at a bittersweet time as just last March and April both of my grandfathers passed away. Up until that point I had always bragged at how fortunate the kids were because they had 2 sets of grandparents, 3 sets of great-grandparents and a great-great grandmother that were all fairly active in their lives. Although we’ve now lost some really special members of the family, we’re still lucky to have so many of our older family members still with us. Deaths do make us realize how we should be spending more time with our grandparents. Perhaps it would be easier if our grandparents had a basic phone that we could contact them on. At least we’d be able to talk to them every day then.

I had to stop and remind myself 101 times that this was Carter’s project and not mine. Hard for a control freak like myself to do, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t get extra points for having his mom complete the assignment! When we sat down to do it Carter’s first question was “Can’t we just go on ancestry.com and get all our information?” Um, no dude. That only works if you’ve actually signed up and entered it!

I may be biased but I’m pretty sure he knocked it outta the park.

We covered lots of generations, as far back as we knew, but we could have gone further if we would have used census records and things like that (you can find them online – see https://www.genealogybank.com/explore/census/1920-records for instance). Then again, where do you stop?!

How super awesome are those wooden men and woman?! It pays to be a craft supply hoarder sometimes.

There they are, must have known I wouldn’t have them around forever. This is the only picture I have of the two of them together. So quiet, always observing, but such strong men.