Branch and root, the tree is growing in more ways than one!

This is my son and new daughter.  You might say this is my step-son and his new wife, my step-daughter-in-law, but I don't particularly care for those titles.  They imply that Jeremy isn't really my son.  That I was married to his father, but not really anything to him.  Nonsense.  I was one of his mothers from the time he was 9 years old.  Yes, he has a biological mother, the woman who carried him and gave birth to him.  The woman who nurtured him and loved him.

But I chose him as my son.  Just as those of you who adopted children chose those specific boys and girls to be your very own, I chose to include Jeremy as one of my sons.  I helped him with homework.  I made his favorite foods.  I played soccer with him  I listened to endless monologues about Pokemon cards, and later about World of Warcraft.  I made him do chores, and cried with him and laughed with him and saw him grow up.  Like his father, I worried about him, and fretted over his decisions, and scolded and praised and complimented and loved.  Always loved.

My husband and I have decided that we will not have daughters-in-law.  Instead, we will have daughters.  My husband always wanted a daughter: girly and giggly and sweet and oh-so-pretty.  Jenn is that daughter and so much more.  She is loving and giving and kind.  She makes our son happy.  She makes us proud to include her in our family.  And, as an added bonus, we don't have to worry about who she dates!

So what, you might ask, does this have to do with a family genealogy blog?

A lot!

With the addition of Jenn to our family, I have two entirely new family lines to incorporate into my research.  I am going to challenge myself, just for the fun of it, and do my best not to ask Jenn or her great mom and dad for any more information than what I already ought to know.  So I know her name, DOB, her parents' names and approximate ages, her sisters' names and approximate ages, places the family lived, and if I can make my brain cooperate, I can add in some grand-parental names, too.

But even more importantly, adding Jenn to our family is a reaffirmation of how I view history and families.

  History, in my book, is the story of the people.  The story of men and women and their lives and actions and reactions and the impact they had on the world around them as well as the future world.  I am not, nor have I ever been, good at dates or memorizing "important" facts.  But I do excel at putting the pieces of the story together and making a whole tapestry of a life out of a few threads and half an old photograph.  And to me, that is the beauty of history.  It is the story of people who lived before me, people with passions and lives and loves and losses similar to my own.

Families are the people we love who surround our lives and hearts.  The may be related by blood or marriage.  Or they may be related by a common bond or the tug of heartstrings.  Whether our families are so "traditional" and "nuclear" and "normal" that they put Norman Rockwell to shame, or they are blended and reblended and then frapped, sizzled, stirred, flipped, and blended again, they are the people who love us and make us not only who we are, but better people than we ever imagined we could possibly become.

When I do research for "non-traditional" families I am struck not by the differences in their family from the rest, but the similarities.  Whether you grew up with a single mom, single dad, a mom and a dad, two moms, two dads, three or four or more parents, or no parents; biologically related parents, court-appointed parents, or many random parents - these parents helped shape you, for good or for ill, into the man or woman that you are today.

I fear that I am talking without saying anything, or at least what I wanted to say, so I am going to stop here.

To Jeremy and Jenn and all the newlyweds, regardless of how many years you have celebrated an anniversary of any sort, I wish you all the best, and happy hunting as you uncover your past!