Roots

It was never hidden from me. The woman I grew up calling Grandma on my Dad's side was not my biological grandmother. His "real" mother was killed in a car accident when he was two. All he remembers is whatever my grandfather told him, which wasn't much.

It never felt like I was missing something until, suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, I was missing everything. I was missing the story of an entire side of my family. Where did they come from? What did they do?

My grandfather wrote down as much of the story of his childhood and his family as he could before he passed away from lung cancer when I was very young. Unfortunately, he never wrote down anything about my biological grandmother.

At first, I tried doing a little research on my own. But because I knew no one's last names or really anyone's first names, I got stuck pretty early on. My dad wasn't much help either.

I turned to my grandmother for help. Not only did she know a little bit more about my dad's birth mother from things my grandfather had told her and the few correspondences she had had with that side of the family, she's also very involved in the genealogy of her own family.

Today we met in her basement and she gave me everything she had left from my birth grandmother. There were a few newspaper clippings from her death and some letters my great grandparents had written to them. Everything else had been given to my father and is buried somewhere in his basement.

Then we started looking through Ancestry.com's archives. Suddenly, a whole world opened up. The answers I had been looking for sat right there. Grandma helped me with names and was able to verify we were on the right path with some memories of other family member's names.

I learned at least two women in my family died very soon after having children. I also learned my family came to Colorado from Texas. Before that, we lived in Tennessee and Arkansas. We learned I come from farmers who didn't have a lot of money but certainly had a lot of children.

Now, I have the beginnings of my roots, the beginning of my story.

Our roots are our families and they are everything. They give us history. They give us a story, a past, something to be proud of. They give us who we are and where we belong.

I love photographing families. I love documenting this story, for the generations living it and the future generations that will one day sit down to do their own search and discover their own past.