Jewells of Thought

Life is bittersweet. Some children grow up without the love and support of their grandparents. Or others have one grandparent and not the other. Not to mention the idea of having great-grandparents lavish their smiles and obvious love towards a child may seem completely oblivion.

A special truth I know from both sides of my family is that I was loved and wanted by my grandparents and great-grandparents. I gave up spending most Sundays around family whether it was at a house or a nursing home or even now at an assisted living residence.

With love such as this, I, my brothers and our cousins knew we could do anything in life. Time, energy and hard work could accomplish anything we put our minds towards. These elders also showed us by example how knowing Christ also factored into our failures and successes in our lives.

One of the rare jewels of my life is that I have grown into this historian. I know my family history fairly well, because others before me also knew it was a necessity to have records for generations to come. My Dad’s Dad was a prisoner of war in World War 2 and most of my life questions about that time in his life have consumed me. It took his death as a teenager to bring me into this world of history, and family history to yesterday.

I am in awe of God’s amazing time in my life. The ways I have been literally handed information and the way I worked for the tidbits of knowledge. I am now, after 23 years after my grandfather’s death able to gain more insight into the courtship of my grandparents. Granted they were apart for two to three years. This is totally like the holy grail for me, for years I thought they had either been misplaced or thrown away by accident. My grandmother is pretty meticulous, but then again she did work at Crane while grandpa served.

I truly had an overwhelming emotional day at the ability to touch such figments of my imagination. I feel blessed to have finally gotten access to these papers and letters from this time of not just family history, but history happening all over this country at that time: women doing men’s jobs while the men serve overseas.

I fully understand this as God’s mercy to give me insight into the loving courtship of two of the persons responsible for my birth two generations removed from World War 2. They are directly why I cannot forget this special era that created both sets of my grandparents also knowing that my great-grandparents were praying for these children and future children of their love.