Making sense of one's life and making peace with one's past is why I am doing this.  I don't think I'm unique in this.  Everyone faces this challenge.

Genealogy is my mother's passion.  The World Wide Web is a great place to pursue that hobby.  So, I tried to present my mother with her own genealogy web site full of Woods, Days, Durdens, Waters and Yeartys as a Christmas gift in 1998.  Her response was cordial lack of interest and no desire whatsoever to learn how to use the Internet.  The web site meant nothing to her --my project, not hers.  Incidentally, I also discovered that genealogy is her hobby, not mine.  She had researched and drawn up not one but two highly elaborate giant-sized family trees going way back, loaded with branches filled with names.   Basically my original intent was to transcribe those in proper format to her web site.  I found that just transcribing row after row of ancient names is deadly, not a way I care to spend time.  Even though they are my kin, I don't know their stories --regretfully, they aren't real people to me.  Only when there is a story attached to the name does a person emerge and I become interested.

In particular I wish I had known my aunt Winnie Belle Wood, the "nurse heroine", the idealist who gave her life trying to serve all people of her community as a public health nurse.  Great ideals, great deeds, but I never got to listen to the music of her thoughts because I never met her --and through the family stories I only met what she did, not her own explanations and reasoning.  I miss that.  (Maybe outside of time she and I will have those conversations.)

I started this now-aborted genealogy project at the point it genuinely mattered, with my aunts and uncles whom I know well and whom I treasure.  I can't authentically move much past that point.  However, capturing that point is definitely worthwhile.  I am saving my aunts' and uncles' stories from my perspective, capturing their existence as people for the next family member (even human family) who cares to know our history.  And I deeply value that history because I'm out here living life, trying to make it, too, just as they did.  They were my teachers, my advisors and my role models, my "card file on life".  I love them, am proud of them, and salute them.  May I do as well.