Give Thanks!

You never know what will inspire a 14 year old.  This week, with no hurricane days to make up, my children were home Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday….so they got to help with more Thanksgiving preparations than usual.  I asked my daughter to help with setting the table.  The idea of tree rounds to hold the candles(very exciting considering we were discussing saws and drills) morphed into "family tree" place card holders.  She woke up Tuesday already thinking about Ancestry.com.  We signed up for the free trial and quickly got to work.  Five hours later…we had unearthed at least two more generations of ancestors, World War I draft cards, Census records from the 1800's, and Birth and Death certificates.  Wow!  She got to see where my great grandmother was declared on the census by her family when she was only 3 years old and one family had listed their residence as The Looney Tavern! She even commented that our family has been a part of Mobile for over 100 years.

These are pictures of the beautiful place cards she made for everyone.  She took a bit of oak tree from the yard, spray painted it with some primer I had, watercolored some fall colors on watercolor paper to cut out leaves, put the branch in modeling clay to stand it up, wrapped that with some fabric scraps and hot glued the family names to each persons tree working back from their name up to their great grandparents.  

Not only is my table beautiful, but I think these are going to be wonderful conversation starters.  Hopefully on a day when we can be distracted by whether or not a recipe turned out or some less than perfect family issues, let us give thanks for those who came before us and made this country what it is--for us and those to come.