Dear Future Kilgores, Long past the day when my bones have turned to dust, some of you may be exploring your genealogy and stumble across the archives of Rootsweb. What you'll discover is a treasure most of us 'familyfishers' would dearly love to have from our ancestors. I have pictures in my head of you reading Donna's posts and wishing you'd known her; or admiring the courage of so many of your ancestors who faced life's darker hours with wit and courage not written about in novels or TV movies. There's a quiet strength to this generation of your family, and I hope that echoes down through the ages. You will marvel to know that I've never met one member of the board face to face, and yet I've grown to admire, respect and love them as if they lived next door and I'd known them all my life. Like the rest of life in this era, there are regulars whose names you see over and over again; and there are immigrant researchers who visit us for a time and then disappear into the vast arena of daily life never to cross our paths again. I mourn that even as I accept it, but when you read these words decades (dare I say centuries?) from now, I hope you sense the community we formed here, at once stable and yet transient. Perhaps, if you're perceptive, you'll note a hole in our correspondence after September 11, 2001. No doubt that date in history will mean something to you. Our world changed that day. We found ourselves engulfed with need, and we responded with incredible clarity and overwhelming charity. But we did more than that: We hugged our children closer to our breasts, and talked longer over the backyard fences with neighbors who mean something to us but often got lost in the shuffle of our busy lives. We asked ourselves deeper questions, and asked our pastors even deeper ones. We gave up our laptops and desktops for chats over tea, prayers in corporate boardrooms, or reading chapters to our children. When you notice the gap, don't mistake it for a waning of our commitment to this powerful family bond we've formed with our Kilgore cousins. Recognize that like your Kilgore ancestors who took up weapons to win our independence, or to defend it from tyranny of all kinds down through the years, we found it necessary to step up and be a different kind of citizen for a time. We'll be back to genealogy and frivolity someday soon, and our records will reflect that to you. I'm a long-distant voice in your past now. I hope I make you laugh, and maybe sometimes cry, because then you'll know we were real, breathing three-dimensional human beings and not linear, one-dimensional statistics in your history. You would like us if you met us. We would like you if we met you. I wish I could list each person for you and describe what I've learned about them. I wish you could read my prayer journal and know their hopes and fears and wishes, their struggles and their triumphs, their foibles and their magic. This is a wonderful generation to be a Kilgore; and as they read this, I hope they are reminded of what they mean to me. Warmest regards from an echo of your past, Randy