It has been awhile since i actually visited my blog. I don't know why I haven't taken the time to set my thoughts to words. I have never been a journaler and maybe that is why. I have friends who carve out time daily to write down their thoughts. I have never been that disciplined. I do have those moments that pop up in the wee hours of the morning where I have great thoughts, epiphanies even, and then I eventually fall asleep and those epiphanies seal themselves into a vault I don't have ready access to.
Here is hoping with my new tablet that I will begin to carve out time. My current passion is reading history, the history I wasn't taught even when I first started college those many many years ago. History is a passion because I don't know my history. it took me far too long from the time I received my original birth certificate to actually do a search on Ancestry. By the time I looked my birth mother had died. Mary Ruth Hoffman, my birth mom. I knew her name early on as I found an article in The Oregonian about a baby found in St. Mary's Catholic Church. That baby was me. I went on Ancestry and found names and photos. Then last year I did their DNA test and discovered, much to my daughter's dismay that my blood would make a White Supremacist proud. My childhood dream of being an Indian princess dashed. I then paid the extra fee to dig deeper and discovered that some branch of my family tree has Ale Hatfield in it. My people come from the Carolina lowlands, they fought on the wrong side of the Civil War and in the Revolutionary War. I traced them back to the 1700s, immigrants from England.
Now I have to decide to pay another fee to access records from England. Not so sure i want to do that. just yet. It's a fairly good racket, want to chase those green leaves around the world it will cost you more money.
My students are interested because I get excited about their history as much as mine. I have begun to ask them, "Do you see your face in our history books?" They sort of do, but mainly the history books tell the history of those who states will buy textbooks about. It's my job to find the books that tell their history. That's my plan for the coming school year. I have purchased several retired history textbooks and through my donorschoose project Knowing the Truth of history makes more powerful, four classroom sets of history books. Hopefully we will be able examine the textbooks and learn as we go.
Tomorrow same place, same time.... I hope.