Tag: genealogy
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A Haunted House of Dreams
You are attached to a mystical tangle of ribbons–other people’s dreams and desires. A flirtation. A wedding. Children. A funeral. And all over again. With blue eyes running along one thread, alcoholism another. Love is tangled in there too. This is my 3x great grandfather’s house. I want to burrow into the collapse to find […]
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A Stolen Tombstone
Why would a person steal from a cemetery? At my favorite family resting spot in the middle of nowhere someone stole the headstone of a Civil War soldier who died of disease before seeing battle. It was early in the war, so his body was sent home. A couple in Florida found the headstone in […]
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Pray for the Dead?
Do you think it’s morbid to pray for the dead? Do you think they can pray for us? I accept that I may have an active imagination and we can’t know for sure if visiting cemeteries brings us closer to our loved ones, but I feel it can. I visited one of my Civil War […]
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The Past is Never Dead
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.” William Faulkner
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The Unknown Soldier
One sharp pain. One utterance of surprise. Oh. He leaves no great philosophies. There are no medals, no headstone. Only a few strings left attached to this world. Letters in government files The sacrifice a mother makes to prove her relation to the boy whose life is opened up on paper for a pension she […]
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Family Histories: Family Traits Good and Bad
“They said in the D.A.R.E. class that since my real mother did drugs Then I probably would too.” (D.A.R.E. is the anti-drug class taught in many public schools in the U.S.) This is why too much information given to children may sometimes be a bad thing. Our newly adopted daughter is only mildly intellectually disabled […]