Well, last week I missed H. It was the first letter I missed in either round. I couldn’t think of a thing. Didn’t feel like blogging.

Amazingly, I did come up with a word that starts with I.
IDENTITY

Who are you? Where did you come from? We all like to know the answers to these questions. Yesterday, instead of writing, I spent some time messing around on a genealogy website. I know a lot about my dad’s side of the family, but not much about my mom’s. I looked up her father and was able to trace that family to figure out they came from the Netherlands somewhere between 1862 and 1873. Pretty cool! My mom was excited because I was able to tell her things she didn’t know! I wasn’t able to find my mom’s mom’s side of the family. I have one possible match, but it’s not quite perfect, so I’m not sure about it.

Does any of this change who I am? Not really. It’s neat to know, but not necessary. Unlike those celebrities on TV, we don’t have any skeletons in the closet. We weren’t here until after slavery ended and none of us fought in any wars or did anything heroic. Not that I found, anyway. We’re pretty vanilla people.

As I was relating this information to my family last night, Brian noted that it was kind of cool, but that he couldn’t do anything like that with his family – meaning his bio family. That must be hard. I do hope that all of our children feel like our family is their family. Without those ancestors that I found yesterday, they wouldn’t be here, in this place, in this home, with these people. That makes those ancestors as important to them as to me.
IDENTITY. I’m a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an author, Dutch, Slovak, a Wisconsinite, an American, a chocoholic, a child of the King.
IDENTITY. Who are you?

Find more I posts on Patty’s blog!