It's taken me a couple weeks to be able to post this. This may be long but it's from the heart.
I started genealogy because I wanted to learn about a ancestor who was in the Civil War. That was the start of it. I fell in love with it and my passion wasn't just contained to a single person. It spread to all, because it was a way of remembering those who would most likely be forgotten over the generations. Genealogy is a way of giving our ancestors immortality. Even after I pass the work and information I have collected will be passed down for generations. Names will be attached to photos, they will not be strangers staring back at my descendants. I wanted to do this for them and for my parents because I knew someday there would be a 'expiration date' (as my Daddy called it) next to their birthdays.
October 10, 2018 of this year was one of those days. It was and still is the hardest most excruciatingly painful day of my life. My father (I was a Daddy's girl, he was my best friend) passed away. The day I had to add that date to his name on our family tree....I can't even describe that pain. But now, I can give him immortality through my work. I can keep him alive for future generations in the stories I add, photos I've taken, and the memories I share. I'm grateful that through genealogy I can keep his memory alive
That's why I do what I do. All of these lives we research and learn about may be just names on papers, a collection of various dates etc. We didn't know all of them, but they were loved by their children and grandchildren and those children and grandchildren are all connected to our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren.
That's why I love genealogy. That's why it's my passion. I feel like I'm bringing a heartbeat back to these people I never knew and those people I loved dearly.
To my Daddy, I will never forget you and I won't let your future descendants forget you either. You fought cancer valiantly for over three years to give us more time. I know you did that for us. Even through the pain you never stopped fighting. Thank you for every day you fought for. I love you so much.
Always Your Little Girl.
My sympathies on the loss of your father. I remember too well the first time I brought up my genealogy database after my mother died in February of last year. I was looking at the blank in the death date of her entry. I didn't want to fill it in.
Take some time to grieve for your father and get to know him in other ways. While I heard her stories all along growing up, I scanned in every photo of my mother as a child and young lady that I could and tried imagining the stories she told made real by the little girl I saw in the photo. While I knew my mother very very well and loved…