Saturday, February 14, 2009

Valentine's Day Musings

It's the reddest day of the year...check out the Genea-Musings color combinations - just for today!

For all of my love-ly Genea-Musings readers - here is a bouquet just for you.



You can even download it (right-click on picture, Save As Picture, put it in a file where you can find it) and send it to your favorite bloggers or email friends. How many times will I get this back?

I posted some Valentine's Day goodies in past years. See:
* Valentine's Day Censuswhacking - some love-ly names from the records

* The Best Valentine's Day Gift Ever - read about 1970.

Look for some Saturday Night Fun tonight on the topic of "Love."

Here's my "musing" for the day:

Each one of us is a product of a mother and a father, and each of them were products of a mother and a father, going back for centuries and eons of history. Almost every one of those births was the product of a "love relationship" - something that drew that man and that woman together at a point in time and created a totally unique human being.

Each set of parents had no idea what the future would hold for their child, but I think that each parent hoped for a happy and fulfilling life for their child. Did Tom and Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln ever consider that their son Abraham would become a lawyer and President of the United States? Did Bill Clinton's parents, or Barack Obama's parents, have those hopes?

I would like to think that my parents hoped that I would get an education, find a useful and rewarding occupation, meet a wonderful "love of my life," have a family that graced their lives with grandchildren, and love and honor them throughout their lives, and their memories after they passed. If that was their hopes, I think that I have fulfilled them. Those were my hopes for our children, and they are in the process of fulfilling them.

One of the reasons that I pursue my genealogy research and write about family history is so that I can tell the stories of my ancestry to my children and their progeny. When my daughter was in college, she wrote me a letter that said "tell me about your life - how were you raised, what did you do, why are you like you are?" I hope that she discovers this blog some day and marvels at the memories, the thoughts, and the wisdom imparted. I hope that she saves these posts (actually, they're on the CD-ROMs I give them every year, but I'm sure that they don't read them!) and reads them when I'm gone and remembers the good times, the fun times, the loving times.

2 comments:

Patti Browning said...

Making CDs of your blog posts to give to your children are such a wonderful idea!

I recall once a few months ago my 15-yr old daughter and I were sifting through some of the old 1880s letters I have from distant relations. She paused and said thoughtfully, "Mom.....these letters are so cool. These people were really REAL. We've got these to look at, after all. But what will we have when we're gone? Emails? No one keeps them. It's like we'll all just disappear."

Out of the mouths of babes, hm? It made me sad and proud all at the same time.

Gini said...

Thank you for the flowers Randy, Happy Valentines day to you and all the other Genea-bloggers...