My Trails into the Past

Learning about our family history is exciting. We’re hoping to find interesting people who have done interesting things--maybe even outstanding things. We’re hoping to connect to famous people in history. Sometimes we do, but most of us have ancestors and family members who just lived normal lives, working hard at surviving and making a life for themselves and their families. Along the way, we discover family members who struggled with surviving and supporting themselves or their families. They may have even abandoned their families. We ask ourselves why? Often these stories don’t get passed down through the family and we don’t learn why. Often the root cause is mental illness, something we only recently talked about in our culture. In the past, a person with mental illness may have been sent away to a hospital or home and forgotten. It’s a shock when we discover a family member in a mental home or hospital through a census record or an obituary. My first experience with this is ...