Thankful For My Parents

Since this is Thanksgiving week, Amy has given us the theme, "Thankful".  Thanksgiving seems to have two emphases to me - giving thanks and family.  So, I am going to combine these two themes in this blog.

I am thankful for many people and events in my life.  Today, I am going to share my thanks for my parents, Dorothy Nell Clark and Aubrey Delton Springer.  I am very glad that my parents shared so many stories and facts about our family, orally and in writing.  I remember many times sitting in the back seat of the car, driving through Ellis County, often on the way to a Family Reunion, and hearing my parents talk about the places they lived, people they knew, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, and more distant relatives.  Still today, as I am driving in an area where I heard these stories, I will bore my family with remembrances of "who, what, when or where" about some member of my family I have heard about, or even I recall.

And then there are the myriad of little snips of paper, envelopes, napkins, newspaper clippings and drawings that they left behind to share the connections, facts and stories of our family.  Snippets from my dad like:

     

Or drawings like:

Or letters like: 

Or charts like: 

     

     

Mom sometimes left more complete stories like: 

     

They seems they kept everything!  Here's the 1940 obituary of my great, great grandmother: 

And, of course photos, like these: 

          

        

      

So, all of these clues, memories and stories that they shared with me are what has given me the desire to put together, make sense of and preserve everything I can get my hands on.  Over the last 33 years, I have worked with, and continue to work with, all these and have added many more tidbits that now make up my work in my family's genealogy.

Thanks, mom and dad!

'Til Next Time!

#52Ancestors