In the Beginning

 I was fortunate to live in the same town as my maternal grandparents from the time I was born.  I spent many happy times at their home.  My grandmother, Eva Lena, gave me a scrapbook that she had assembled when she was quite young.  I enjoyed looking at the yellowed pages containing things such as colorful pictures of flowers cut from magazines or seed catalogues.  Other items were Sunday School leaflets.  I think this scrapbook started my interest in asking my grandmother about her life when I was older.  I should have spent much more time with her than I did, and should have done it when she was younger and her memory was better.

Eva was asked to contribute family history information to a history compiled by Stephen Baird Peter which she was pleased to do.  Stephen, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was a senior in high school at the time he compiled his family's history which he began work on in 1961 and published it that same year.  By the 1970's my mother knew I was voicing interest in family history and she knew about this Baird history, so she wrote to Stephen to request purchase of a copy.  Once I had the Baird history, I'm quite sure that is when I began to talk more with my grandmother about her life.

I found out that my grandfather, Elbert W. Ward, had looked into his family background, in a limited way I think.  He owned a very old Ward genealogy book which was published in 1851.  The title is, "Ward Family Descendants of William Ward who settled in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1637, by Andrew Henshaw Ward.  I learned that I have a very famous ancestor, Major General Artemas Ward.  He was a prominent American military leader during the American Revolutionary War, most notably serving as the first Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army before being replaced by George Washington; he was a Massachusetts native who also held political positions in the state, including serving in the Continental Congress and the U.S. House of Representatives after the war.  My Aunt Bette Ward, Elbert's daughter-in-law, had been doing research on the Ward family line, so I was given the pedigree charts that she had done and that opened up my interest even further in that side of my family.

I bought a book for myself and my mother, for recording family history.  Sometimes we worked on them together.  I was married in 1962, then had our first child in 1966, so my time spent on family history was sporadic during the years my two children were growing up.  Until today, January 4, 2024, when I read about the idea of writing a short story every week for a year, each week about a different ancestor or family member, I had never just started writing.  It was just too easy to start filling in names and dates in my book, or later on Family Search, instead of writing stories that would be much more interesting.  I'm looking forward to writing first about the people I know best, my parents and grandparents.