“Life has no remote. Get up and change it yourself.” ~ Unknown
I love it when the Universe conspires for good. About ten days ago there came a comment on an outhouse post from Lori Sanford (center). She found me through an outhouse image that Google indexed of the Patrick and Rebecca Risner headstone. Lori was researching her genealogy. After finding the tombstone, and reading the post, she assumed we were related. She assumed correctly. The Risner’s had five daughters and one son: Daisy, Chester, Minnie, Hester, Ada, and Hazel. My great-grandmother was Minnie. She married Douglas Adams and they had seven children: Eugene, Orville (my grandfather), Edna (Lori’s great-grandmother), Wick, Opal, Mildred, and Randy. We exchanged a few emails and hit it off right away. Tonight, with her mother Sharon (right), we met for dinner. Sharon’s mom, Imogene (mom’s first cousin), is now 87 and in poor health, so sadly she couldn’t join us. Mom and Sharon hadn’t seen each other since Edna’s funeral in 1985. (As an aside, I called Edna ‘Banana.’ Nobody knows why.) We all learned things about the family we didn’t know before we sat down together. Marriages, deaths, affairs, quirks, similarities, differences: we ran through the list. Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that Lori is also a drummer. Both she and mom played drums in marching band. Imagine three female drummers in one family. How awesome is that? Plus, mom and Sharon have birthdays just four days apart (Jan 24 and 20 respectively), so tonight we celebrated them both. Mom and I had a fantastic time, and I’m pretty sure Lori and Sharon did, too (poor dad was outnumbered). We vowed to meet again, and it’s a dinner I look forward to. Thank you, Universe, for helping Lori find me, for Sharon, for mom, and for a really colorful family history.
may 6, 2023 – the outhouse: where art goes
[…] of the outhouse might recall meeting my cousin Lori Sanford back in January 2018. I think of it as a God thing that she researched her genealogy around the same time I posted about […]
september 21, 2023 – the outhouse: where art goes
[…] whom I called Banana, were excellent musicians. (you’ve met her great-granddaughter Lori here) I have his banjo and guitar. He played old-style clawhammer banjo, and I wish he had played more […]