Labor Day

It was one year ago today, the Labor Day holiday, that my search for Lola began in full force. Prior to that, a friend started my family tree in his Ancestry.com account and gave my sister and I "editor" rights. My sister owns the Ancestry account, and I have added many people to the tree and have become rather obsessive with doing research. I have reached out to others when I felt the Ancestry.com hints made sense. I have found all kinds of people that we never knew existed. I grew up feeling that my mom had a family (mostly in Canada where she was born) but that my dad had none, except for his sister and her family.

So, since the hard-core search that began one year ago, I have found my grandmother's parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, along with spouses and in-laws and nieces. I've also been really lucky to find living descendants and have reached out to them. I've heard back from some and am hoping for pictures and stories and answers. Surely, my reaching out to these people must be odd. I just keep thinking that I'd be elated if someone reached out to me, but that hasn't yet happened.

I have found the great granddaughter of Lola's sister Bessie's niece, Grace! She has promised to reach out to her aunt who was raised by Grace. This is exciting as I might be able to get info, pictures and stories about Bessie and her family! I'm also trying to reach out to the family of my great grandfather, George's second wife. George married a woman named Grace after he and Effie divorced. Grace had two daughters, Mary and Catherine. Mary had a daughter who is still alive and would have been about 7 years old when George died. I tried reaching out to her via Classmates.com, but haven't heard back. I then tried reaching out to her son, via his ancestry tree, but to no avail. I did find one other option - another son on Facebook. That message is going out tomorrow.

The other thing that will happen tomorrow? I'll post some of my art! I fully planned to do that before now, but I had so much to do (errands, oil change, etc.) and didn't do any of it yesterday because it was so freaking hot. I don't have A/C in the car, so I am very careful these days about my running around. I did the errands today because I fully believed the news reports that it was going to be considerably cooler out. Not true at all. It was hot as hell.