Saturday, September 29, 2018

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Family Pet Stories

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!



Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) 
What were your family pets?  What were their names?  How long did they live?  What stories do you have about them?


2)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your post.

Thank you to Janice Sellers for suggesting this topic.  If you have an idea for an SNGF topic, please let me know.  

Here's mine:

In my parents family, we had cats.  Living between two fairly busy streets (30th Street and Fern Street), our outdoor cats rarely lasted more than a year - we had many cat burials.  I don't recall the names (this is the 1950s and 60s!), except for one:  Rootie-Toot-Toot.  She was one of the kittens that we had (no cat birth control then), and Rootie managed to survive for many years (how many?  Maybe 12-15? I moved out before he died).  I think he died of old age.  He was an indoor cat and an outdoor cat.  He was my brother Scott's cat, and slept with Scott.  He purred really loud, as I recall.


In my family with my wife and daughters, we also had cats (funny how that happens).  When we moved in in 1975, there was a feral Manx cat residing in our fenced side yard and she had kittens.  We couldn't pet the mother but we petted the kittens some, but they stayed outside.  We named the mother, but I don't recall the name.  We eventually called a Manx cat collector and they came and captured the entire group of them and took them away, but not before I got a nasty puncture bite in my thumb.

Our neighbors moved in 1982, and they gave us their 3-year old cat named Softie.  She was semi-Persian and the fur was long and soft.  Our girls were young, and loved Softie.  She lived outdoors but often came into the house.  We fed her outdoors, and our yard became a lure for other animals too - especially possums who ate the cat food.  Softie would retreat and jump up on the overhead lath until they left, and could get up on the roof too.  She was safe up there.  Softie died in 1999 of kidney failure on the couch one evening.  We kept her in, knowing the end was near.  I went to bed, but was awakened by an angel ornament on the wall falling and shattering on the tile floor.  Then I saw that Softie had died on the couch.  Was it her spirit flying off to heaven?  Something similar has never happened since.   Softie lies in the backyard where the peach tree used to be. 

We haven't had a pet since then, but we enjoy the pets that our daughters have.

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The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2018/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html

Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

I love this theme. I need to get out photographs of pets to scan.

https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2018/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html

Janice M. Sellers said...

I'm glad you liked my suggestion, Randy! Here's mine, with lots of photos.

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2018/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html

Linda Stufflebean said...

Randy and Janice, Thanks for a fun topic. Here's my post and the pets have always been in photos, so I have some to share. https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2018/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-10/

Nancy Ward Remling said...

I actually caught up enough to do one on time instead of months late!

https://remlinggenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/10/saturday-night-challenge-family-pet.html

Mikey the dog that "owned" me.