Fifty Years

Today, I'm introducing you to my cousin, Margaret Ann and her husband, Jack, who celebrated fifty years of wedded bliss in August of 2006.

Now, I don't know how anyone else may feel about wedding anniversaries, but I happen to feel anyone who can manage to survive fifty years together deserves a really big medal! Heck, I couldn't even make eight years with my ex, much less fifty. One of us would have been dead by now.

Margy and Jack have three great children - Jeff, Ellen Rochelle and John Robert, as well as seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter now too. Margy's dad and my dad were brothers and I see so much how Margy looks a great deal like her dad.

One of these days I'm going to introduce everyone to one of Margy's grandsons too - who just happens to be a really fascinating young man with lots and lots of idealism and many dreams. But that's for another time.

Looks to me like the fifty years together have blessed Margy and Jack very well, don't you agree?

Deeper Roots

While hunting through some old photos I had saved in various places, I found this one and thought it appropriate to post to go along with the photo in the previous blog of my dad and some of his siblings, taken around 1912 or 1913.

This picture is of my great-grandfather, George Hill and his second wife, Mary Todd Hill and some of their children and was taken in 1896, somewhere in Montana.

I can't identify the great-aunts and great-uncles on this photo as I have never met any of my Dad's relatives from "out west." This photo was sent to me by the daughter of the youngest son born to George and Mary Todd Hill - Robert Todd Hill. His daughter, Evelyn Hill Sturm, who now resides in Sun City, Arizona and who was kind enough to send me the complete family tree for George Hill - which includes all his children from his first marriage to Christina Hunter and those children born to his second marriage to Mary Todd. I would never have been able to put together a family tree on this side of my Dad's family without her kindness and generosity and the 13-14 years of hard work she had put into her research prior to my finding her online through a query she had posted about the Hill family.

As anyone who does family tree research of any type will tell you, no tree is ever "complete." But, Evelyn has researched our lineage back to the early 1800's in Scotland and has documentation she provided me I believe as far back as my great-great-great-grandfather there - whose name - gee, go figure - was also George Hill.

And true to the Scottish naming traditions, my grandparents named their first son (also their first child), George Hill. That brother of my Dad's named his first son George Hill - but the family has always called him "Skip" or "Skipper" and Skip and his wife named their first son George Heystel Hill but he is known as Hy or Hystel. It can get pretty doggone confusing when one is trying to figure out which generation you are referring to in this family - and others like them - when there is such a proliferation of the same name -George Hill! Almost like looking for information on someone named "John Smith" isn't it?

I'd love to be able to continue to get updated information on the descendants of George and Christina Hunter Hill or George and Mary Todd Hill but the only relative I have any contact with pertaining to those relatives is Evelyn Sturm and I think the family has spread out over so many states and large cities now too, that she is losing track and contact with many of the descendants as well.

So, if you happen to be reading this and have the surname of Hill in your family tree and your ancestors once lived in Grand Coulee, Cascade County, Montana then there might be a very good possibility that we are cousins. And if you're interested, please feel free to contact me!

I'd love to hear from any of these unknown family members, leave a trail too for my children and grandchildren to follow so who knows, someday the twain shall meet!