WRITING OUR OWN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Don't you wish there was a way to contact our ancestors so that we could ask them questions about what their lives were like and what their opinions were on interesting subjects?
When we were young most of us were too busy to take much interest in stories about what our parents or grandparents life was like when they were children, young adults or in their advanced years. I'm sure we all remember some of our parent's stories and a lot of us probably felt they were a little boring at the time; never realizing that someday they would be very important to us and to our children

Usually we find ourselves wondering what their lives were like after it 's too late. I know I wish I had started caring more about our family genealogy when I was much younger. Sometimes we even start making efforts to learn more when we know a loved one is close to death.
Someday our children, grandchildren, great-great grand- children and even great-great- great grandchildren will have questions about us. Since we cannot rely on someone else to write down these stories, we could all make their quest for knowledge easier by creating our own biographies. They don't have to be fancy or in a book form; but along with our picture albums and our GEMS Genealogy we could include some pages with our thoughts and any other interesting facts about our life and the lives of those nearest and dearest to us. Each story will be unique and a valuable treasure to future generations that otherwise would only know us by a name or a picture, if they are fortunate enough to have one.
It was around 1985 when I first started tracing our ancestors. Like many people that have been uprooted in their childhood, I had lost track of all my relatives on my Father's side of the family. This most likely happened because my Father had died at the early age of fifty-two years old.

My sister, Barbara (Gillespie) Cecil, had kept in touch with our second cousin, Alice Ann (Bizzett) Wallace, who lives in Louisiana; and our Aunt Gertrude (Gillespie) Bush and our Uncle Paul Bush. I wrote to all of them expressing my interest in genealogy and asking for any information they might have.

Around that same time I was talking with my boss, Henry Coffee, who was also tracing his family tree. I mentioned that one of the names I was researching was "Eperthener". His business partner, Ernie Esparza, was on the telephone at the time but when he hung up he asked me if I had said Eperthener. I said yes and asked him if he knew anyone by that name.
It turned out that a friend of his, Dale Eperthener, used to work for our company many years earlier. Ernie and his wife, Sheila, were still friends with Dale and Viola Eperthener and he gave me Dale's address and phone number. It turned out that they only lived about twenty miles from us; a short distance in California.

The very next day I received a response from my letter to my cousin, Alice Ann. She wrote that she had remained close to our cousin, Jane (Erperthener) Struthers, She mentioned that Jane had a brother named Dale that lived somewhere in California, and she promised to write Jane and get me his address.
I soon received a very nice letter from Jane and found that her brother Dale and Ernie's friend Dale were indeed the same person.

My husband, Dane, and I invited Dale and Viola to our house and we had a wonderful evening of exchanging memories and getting to know each other.

We have seen Dale and Viola several times since then and we even met Dale's sister Jane and her husband, Dick, when they came to visit Dale and Viola from their home in Pennsylvania. Dale died in 1995 and if I hadn't started to trace our ancestors we might not have met, even though we were second cousins and had a mutual friend that I saw daily at work.

My cousin, Caroline (Gillespie) Hartman and her husband Tom were in California on a business trip and I was very happy that we were able to meet with them for dinner and have a chance to visit again after forty -some years!

I also had several phone conversations with my Uncle Paul, the husband of Gertrude (Gillespie) Bush. Those phone calls were very special to me and I'm very thankful that I had the opportunity to talk to him before he passed away in 1989.

It is indeed a small world once you start to trace your family tree.

 

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