I hate to be a pain, but does anyone in this group have access to either a poem or a story about a woman who finds a picture of a female ancestor that she never knew and thinks about how they might be alike. I know I have received something like that in the past but I am out of town, on my laptop and can't find the thing using Google search on the internet. I'm sure it is on my big 'un at home. Would appreciate a copy if anyone has a clue as to what I am talking about. (sometimes that is more than I have... haha) Thanks in advance Marsha mrmfamily@aol.com

The series I think your talking about was "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" by Jan.....below is one of her stories....Tami Ramsey Sunday Afternoon Rocking Memory Links (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series) The old woman lay abed, her thin wispy white hair barely visible against the bleached whiteness of the feather pillow. She squinted as a shadow moved against the door frame, then she recognized a shape, a voice, and her face creased in a wan smile. Her hand raised softly in welcome, but briefly, for she was very weak. It was her grandson, the grandson she had seen come into the world and had a large hand in the raising of. He was special, this young man, and more so because of his beginnings. He had been born just a few months after the untimely death of his father one snowy Christmas Eve. It was a sad time, his mother still mourning the death of her young husband, the cold chill of the season exceeded only by the chill of a heart, when the birthing pangs began. And she endured them, wondering how she would raise this child alone, yet glad she had some bit of her husband still with her. The old woman was there at his birthing and at his raising, and through her efforts and those of his mother, who took in the washing of the men who worked the iron furnaces, they had raised him up to manhood. And a fine man he was, with two little girls of his own. Were those the two little girls hovering behind him now? She squinted and tried to focus. They neared her bedside, and he lifted each little girl to kiss the worn wrinkled cheeks of the woman their Papa called Granny. She could barely see them, the cataracts now were bad and she was all but blind. She could not bear to hold them close, such was the cancer eating at her breast. But she cupped her thin hands around their chubby cheeks and she kissed each in turn. Tom had brought his little girls to say goodbye, for his uncle Ben had told him it would not be long. And it was not. She died in the flooding season, when the bottom lands were swollen and heavy with water, and he could not hitch up the wagon and bring his family to her dying or her burying. And the little girls did not know the story, never realized she was born in 1825 in Virginia, traipsed through Ohio and Kentucky with her husband before coming to Tennessee. They knew next to nothing of her living or of the people she loved, or the things she had seen. They never realized how many wonders she must have lived, how many great changes she had witnessed come to pass in 93 years. They knew very little of her life, and remembered only a moment frozen in time because Papa carved that moment and put them in it. They did not know if she ever was lifted by her papa to kiss her own great grandmother's cheek and say goodbye. They remembered nothing but the day their papa lifted them to kiss hers. And I know this is true, for my aunts remembered, and when they were ninety and ninety one years of age they told me the same story they had told me for many years. I have searched and found something more of my great great grandmother's life than my aunts knew. And I have found a photo album filled with tintypes and ancient photos that she must have given my grandfather when he was a boy, on a long ago Christmas day in the 19th century. I have run a wondering finger over the script that tells me it was a gift to him from her, and I have wished she had labeled the pictures that I might know who they are, and what they were to her. I have searched and this is all I have found, bits of faded handwriting in a photo album and on census records. I peer at the handwriting and long to read the person behind it, long to know the things she saw, the way she lived, the thoughts she had, the feelings. And they are gone, and were it not for one, only one day, carved by my grandfather for his daughters' goodbye to his grandmother, I would have not even that memory passed on. But there is a link.they knew and remembered her.and I knew and remember them. And my children knew them, and I brought them to say their goodbyes. The link between my great great grandmother and all those who came before her is gone, for if she shared her memories no one passed those on. And so the chain begins with her, she is remembered, the little girls who kissed her and lived nearly as long as she, are remembered. And as long as someone remembers and passes the memory on, the chain will go on and on. It is a living thing, a memory link, something no paper can dispute or erase. If one person knew another and tells of it, and that person who remembered is remembered by another, who is remembered in turn, the links are living things. And so I have thought back many times, looked at each main line of descendency for those memory links. And I can go no further in any of the families than a few generations. I am lucky to have one line I can find memory links to a fourth great grandfather, but for most it is a third. I have told my children the stories, but although they are adults, they are young. They live in the present. I have written the stories, but I am not sure they read. I am not sure they understand the living thing a series of memory links is, or why it is so important to me. I am not sure they understand that roots are what anchor a tree. They will grow into it. Most all of us do as branches begin to weigh heavy on the limb that is our own. A cousin has the iron pot my great grandmother and great great grandmother used to do the washing of the furnace workers, trying desperately to raise a boy without a father. I told my cousin the story she was too young to have ever known, too young to have felt the need to ask the questions that would have brought forth the answers. But for the memory of that, told me by my aunts who knew, from their father who watched the tired woman boiling the clothes over the smoky fire, no one would know it for anything but an iron kettle. Just an oddity from days before modern conveniences. A memory link makes it something more. Passed from grandfather to children to me to a cousin of another generation. Four times the story passed. I hope my cousin tells her children, that when her time of goodbyes comes, it is not just an iron kettle. Memory links have life to them, because they are passed by those who are living, to another, and another. If we do not share the little pieces we remember of those who have gone before they are reduced to what records may survive, if any. They are reduced, perhaps, to unlabeled photographs. It is not enough to speak of them, for tender young branches do not question the roots that support them, or ask for anything more than to reach into the sky and embrace the wind. I think it best to write them, every wisp of memory, even something as nondescript as the day two little girls were lifted by papa to kiss a furrowed old cheek of a blind woman. Someday someone will read a memory link, and pass it on, this time perhaps adding the telling of the day she kissed ourselves in our own time of goodbyes. Just a thought, jan