Always Southern

My life started in the desert of California, but the roots were Oklahoma and beyond. I didn't know much or care really, but the songs I attached and hung on to were Swannee River, Oh Shanandoah,
On top of Old Smokey, Dixie, When Johnny comes marching home and so on. I didn't hear history one way or the other, it wasn't in the conversations except for some tales I heard about my GR Grandpa Gideon and his experiance in THE WAR. He was too young to join, so he ran away from home for  two weeks or so to follow and join the troups. Supposedly he decided that the peach trees in Georgia weren't big enough to shelter behind!

But somewhere, within, I was southern to the core. How did it happen. I lived in California and Kansas and raised by Okie parents. But Southern I was.

We had to do that High School Genealogy thing. I got some letters and papers that a Gr Aunt had written Grandma  Irick and studied them and had a wonderful family tree. Quite a bit of it even turned out to be true but when I did get around to studying it later--the further back in time I got the more important the ancestors and their connections and somehow- I stopped believing.

Genealogy was put on hold while I got busy raising a family. We lost a daughter, but I was pregnant and you do for the living and go on. Later on we lost another daughter and the grief was black and cold and lonely. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't weep enough and   -kind of tough.

A daughter bought me a Family Tree software program for Christmas. OH Yeah!  I had software, an internet connection, a tiny bit of history and lots of discoveries to make, and long long nights of wakefulness to do it.
The Search was on.

So here are some of the things that I discovered.