Starting over with a new focus...

Back again...ready to start over; to refocus.  Since my last post in 2016, a lot has happened. The most important as far as this blog is that I have begun to really look at, read and analyze my grandfather's papers that were entrusted to me so long ago. 

When my aunt Eadie Pearl (nee McLauchlin) Higginbotham took me out to the barn behind her house (in 1976) to show me the trunk she kept there, I never expected more than a restoration project of an old family trunk.  When we opened it up & I asked her about the papers inside, she told me they belonged to her parents, Daniel James and Lula Mylinda (nee Sullivan) McLauchlin.  Knowing from my many questions that I was interested in the family history, she asked me if I wanted the papers also.  I jumped at the offer! 

The trunk was eventually restored by a professional furniture restorer, and the papers (saved into sheet protectors and binders) sat on shelves in my home for the last 40 years.  I occasionally took out a notebook & flipped through, and gleaned a few genealogical tidbits from those brief forays, but did not take on the project of cataloging, transcribing, scanning and putting them in archival boxes (ready to donate?) until I retired in January of 2012. Since then, I have been doing all those things daily whenever I was at home in Houston. I estimate that I'm only half way through.  Far enough, however, to begin to share some of the more interesting finds among these 75-100+ years old papers.

In 2018, I will begin to publish some of these papers on this blog. This first letter is from my mother, Dorothy Louise Mueller, to my grandmother, Lula, shortly after my birth. The "baby" mentioned in the letter is me! The comment about gaining weight on page 2 has proven to be prophetic as I have struggled with my weight my entire life!