Yesterday we celebrated Martin Luther King Day by going to visit Aunt Colleen at her new location. She has moved to an assisted living center here in Morgan and has been there a little over two weeks. She is getting settled into her new surroundings and introduced us to all of her friends. She even has a sucker drawer in here room! Caroline, in typical fashion, was enthralled by everything and loved her "pretty bathroom, pretty stuffed animals" and "can I have some of your pretzels on the table?" We were also able to see Betty Brown, a neighbor of ours and my kindergarten teacher, Miss Compton. She was my teacher in 1977! That was a long time ago and I thought she was old then. She was a wonderful teacher and I have such fond memories of her. It was great to see her for a few minutes yesterday.
Colleen is my Grandma Faye Crouch London's youngest sister. She is the only surviving child of Grandma Rae and Grandpa Med Crouch. I was born on Grandma Rae's birthday in 1971. She was born in 1891! I was born on her 80th birthday. She had a sucker drawer in her house that we could always get a sucker drawer out of when we visited, and now Aunt Colleen has one. It warmed my heart to see my kids reaching into the sucker drawer as I had so many times at Grandma Rae's. I'm glad that my kids are having some of the opportunities to I had growing up with a lot of relatives around. I always felt a special connection to Grandma Rae because we shared a birthday. She had four children: Faye, Bobbie, Wayne and Colleen. She gave birth to them all at home and three of them on her ranch up Lost Creek. We recently got a new copy of her personal history that she wrote. It has wonderful stories, and she was quite the character.
Colleen married a Mecham, so we are related to her on my dad's side and to her husband's side through Matt! Mechams abound in Morgan, and there is even another Matt Mecham who lives right down the road. Matt's ancestor many generations back was a brother to the Mechams that settled in Morgan.
My kids are having fun realizing they are related to many of the kids that they go to school with. This was the norm for me growing up, but they have never had this experience before. Since both sides of my family settled in this area in the late 1800s, our family runs very deep in this area. I told Joseph that he was related to a boy he knew and he said, "Does he know that we are cousins? Are we related to everyone here?" Alex went to play at a boy's house last Friday and I realized that we were related to them too, although distantly. Our common ancestors were John Toone and Jemima Cook, both members of the Martin Handcart Company.
What a blessing to have a great heritage! What a responsibility to live up to those who have gone before and sacrificed so much to build our family and the life we currently enjoy! I think of how much courage it took so many of my ancestors to leave their homes (a lot of them in England), travel by boat, and then by wagon to a wilderness and begin a new life! Or to leave Sweden and come to a country where no one spoke their language. We have stories about my Great-grandma Hilma Forsberg Rose coming to the US at about age 8 and how she worked so hard to learn her English. We recently got a CD with scans of papers and things from her life and it had her writings in Swedish and English. We have an amazing pioneer heritage on both sides of the family and I want to create a book for the kids to read these stories of faith. So I better get to work!
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