visiting with ancestors

Forty years ago when my parents died I inherited a box filled with many  unlabeled photos, newspaper clippings, and scraps of paper with handwritten notes. At that time I was a busy working mother and after a few half hearted attempts to unravel it all I tucked it away for later.

My children are grown, I'm retired and we have incredible tools and resources to use in our quest for ancestry.

I've made family trees, photos albums on line of various family members with notes about their lives that I've shared with cousins, and I feel like I really know many of my ancestors well. Of course, one branch in particular kept very good records and photos.

My great, great grandparent on my mother's side had some poignant and interesting tales to tell since he was a doctor in the plantation south during the Civil War and after.

After the war he lost 2 of his children and a grandchild to diphtheria. He kept journals of patients and their treatments and a narrative about the loss of his children. I could feel his despair at not being able to save them.

My great, great, grandfather Dr. David Raymond Fox ( from a tin type)

Great, great grandmother, Tryphena Holder Fox

I have spent so much time with them uploading photos, reading and copying letters and sharing their stories that I feel that I actually knew them.

I also learned that Tryphena's letters to her mother were made into a book by someone researching southern history.

Their home was on the lower Mississippi River . We visited it often when I was a child. It was where my great aunt still lived. A hurricane destroyed it in 1965.

The challenge to get as much of it saved and documented goes on. I joined ancestry.com recently and am trying to put as much as I can there for others to use.