Welcome!

First, a thank you for joining me on this new blog.  I hope to provide family stories and some family history of ancestors I’ve never met.  While I haven’t found anyone truly famous, yet, I have found a few folks with a small modicum of notoriety.  But first, let me tell you the story of my humble beginning.

For a bit of background let me ‘splain.  I have learned just this week of a somewhat troublesome time my siblings went through before I was born.  It would seem that my family spent about two years without our dad being with them.  Honestly, the stories my older siblings are giving me are somewhat contradicting.  But it was an awfully long time ago and they were young kids, the eldest around 10 years old.  So, it’s understandable that some fact may have become blurred over time.

After the dust settled on the issue and everyone was back together my family was living in Coconut Grove, just outside of Miami, Florida.  It would seem that about 8 months before my birth my parents took a vacation down to the Keys.  I’m sure you see where this is heading.  Yes, they brought me home.  A little souvenir to remember the trip.  Naturally this was a surprise as my mom was just shy of her 37^th birthday when I was conceived.  In the late 1950’s maternity care was not even near what we have now, and for an almost 40-year-old, smoker and drinker, I was a danger to both she and I.

And that’s pretty much exactly what happened.  One night my mother starting hemorrhaging badly.  The condition is called Placenta Previa.  The placenta, and me along with it, started to detach from the uterine wall. 

My eldest sister tells me she was asleep in her bedroom when this started.  Her room was in the front of the house (I don’t remember this house at all, so I’ll take her word for it), and she never heard the sirens, the ambulance, or the medics wheeling my mother out of the house.  She woke up a little later and found our grandmother, Nanny we called her, cleaning the bathroom from the blood my mom lost.

My mother used to rub it in my face that she had to have an emergency cesarean section with just a local anesthetic.   Seems the doctors gave her a 50/50 chance that one or the other of us, or even both of us wouldn’t survive the procedure.  Luckily, we both survived.  My mother was a very strong woman with a very high pain tolerance.  She also told me many times that I never stopped being a pain in her side.  I know for a fact that it was not always said in jest.  That’s probably why my dad gave me Skeeter as a nickname.  I was a pest.  I interrupted their plans for a quiet retirement.  

I have more stories to share about my parents.  Like how they lied to everyone about their wedding date.  How my mother was a bit of a party animal in her younger days.  My siblings are giving me stories about our Uncles and Aunts to relate.  And some of them were real characters.  But most were amazing people.  I have several veterans, of both genders as well.  And Nanny’s stories are some of my favorite.  There’s the one about the Playboy magazines, her restaurant in Pennsylvania.  But the one about her wake is the best!

I also have even more black holes in my tree.  I really hope to be able to tell you about some “great-great” grandparents one day.  If you have read my Random Ramblin’s blog, some of those stories are there.  I will take those posts and expand on them as I can.  As soon as I can find a good way to post the family tree diagrams those will be here as well. 

Thanks again for finding this new blog.  Please pass it on to other folks that have a genealogy bent like I do.  Please leave comments below.  I *think* I turned off the registration requirement, but let me know if there are issues. 

Peace,
B

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