Writing your history- Then & NOW- Your Family

Through the middle of December, there will be a series of journal prompts regarding your life now and as a child. These prompts are about your life today.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking about you and your experiences. This is your history and writings of your individual experiences.

Who do you live with?

Are you currently married? If not, have you ever been married?

I live with my husband of 26 years and three living children. They are pictured above heading out for our Grand Biking Adventure., which was 170 miles this year. Our three youngest learned to ride bikes at age three, our oldest saw her brother on his bike and asked that her training wheels taken off and rode without them the same day.

Our last bikepacking trip all together.

Are your parents or grandparents alive? How are your relationships with them?

Do you have any children?

Do you live near your family?

Our family decorating my oldest daughter’s grave for Dia De Los Muertos this year. When she passed away we decided to have her buried in the closest plot to her high school, which is on the other side of the row of trees and 5 miles from our house. We live 1,500 miles from our extended family and wanted to have her buried close to us, rather than in our family cemetery in Oregon.

Not watching where you are going- in cars and in research

I think that far too often we are distracted when we are working on most things in our lives that we don’t fully focus on what we should be. While bikepacking with my family this summer, I came across this sign, 4 days later when we were passing this same town on our way home there was a similar sign. It was obviously not a road, but is part of the I&M Canal Path. It appears as if too often people are paying too much attention to their GPS and not the road. (Note the single track down the middle and the narrow passage next to the utility pole.)

I&M Canal Path near Illini State Park

When I am doing research or look at what others have put together, I always verify the information that they give me, as too often people are careless or do not fully vet the information that they are gathering. Are we making assumptions about those we come across? Are we finding someone with a similar name in a document and assuming it is the person we are looking for?

For a project my senior year in high school, I did a family history project on the David Newton Dague family. I assumed that the child, Shirle was female. Shirle was born in 1881 and died in 1897, so did not appear in any available U.S. Census record. Besides family records, I had some pages from Carrie M. Dague’s The history and genealogy of the Dague family and on page 168 she has the spelling of the name as Shirley. I think it was a novices mistake that my 17-year old self made to assume that a Shirle/Shirley was female and not having seen the movie Airplane. If I had been careful I would have also realized that on the same page, she lists my great-aunt Joann as John. Thankfully, it was not a generational connection, so did not send me branching off into someone else’s tree.

It wasn’t until 2014 when I was researching this line some more, that I came upon a newspaper article indicating that the son of David Dague had passed away that I corrected my mistake.