The Good Daughter

I’m getting a lot of clues and hints from websites like Ancestry and MyHeritage. They make this family tree TOO easy to create.

How easy you may ask? Well, I get so excited clicking to add new people that somehow I end up with a family of clones. Or at least multiple sets of identical twins.

So the interesting insight I had today came when I was merging the Caroline clones into one person and adding a missing daughter, Cornelia. Eventually I got the count to come out right, but to think that if I wasn’t checking sources to make sure these hints were right, I would have missed Cornelia entirely.

And Cornelia was the good daughter. She was the one who took care of her widowed mother until she died. She even sold her house to pay her mother’s medical bills. Is there any doubt she was the good daughter?

It strikes me though, Cornelia didn’t start out the good daughter – she got married and her husband left to fight in the Civil War and never came back. Leaving her with a child to raise on her own.

So before she was the good daughter, she was that kid in trouble who came home to live in the basement because she couldn’t make it on her own.

It makes me think about what it means to be family, and how helping your kids today may be setting the stage for your kids helping you later on down the road.