Thankful Thursday - Undying Gratitude

There is one person who is so deserving of my gratitude in many ways. She is a very special person to me and to many others. That is my mother, Shirley Hoover Plummer. I think I always appreciated her. Some people lose that for a few years when they are teenagers, but I don't think I ever did. Being one of the younger kids in the family, I got to see her daily interactions with my older siblings and their children. I understood her individual love for each person. They were all special to her, but that didn't lessen how special I felt either.

She is the person that helped me most in my genealogy search, even thought she died about fifteen years before I started.

My mom was visiting with me one day and I asked her to do something for me. It was about 34 years ago. I thought it was 20-30 years ago, but now thinking back it was before we went to Colorado to visit my aunt.

I showed her the Bible my first husband had bought me for a wedding gift. It had a very nice family tree section in the front. He told me he bought it so I could fill in our wedding and our children as they came along. I loved my Bible but it had no ancestors in it. I asked her to help me fill it in. She couldn't give me many dates, but she gave me lots of names, some of the spellings weren't quite right, bit that didn't matter. She even knew a lot of information on my Dad's family, people she had never even met. She used to go rub my dad's mother's feet when my grandma couldn't get around anymore.  She probably spent a lot of time listening to her stories. There she was making someone else feel special.

When we made the trip to Colorado, she told my aunt that I needed to know the names of our ancestors. They sat down with a pen and paper and talked about what they could remember. The two of them together talked and came up with a few more names. I took the paper home and merged the lists.

When people asked me, " How did you get so much information so quickly?" My answer was "Mom helped me" She has been gone for 15 years and she still continues to make me feel special.

Here is a picture of mom and her sisters.

Aunt Ruth, Aunt Betty, Aunt Milly, Mom, and Aunt Pauline