Not a day goes by that I don’t reflect on the letters that came frequently from Mildred with new bits of information on our family genealogy and the next research topic that I could dig into here in Maryland for her and Steve living in Ohio.

I’m still looking for the Franklin connection we discussed on more than one occasion and still haven’t found it, although Franklin pops up and catches my attentions when I am doing research because of the length of discussions we had on the topic.

Mildred and Stephen were another of the old-school researchers, digging into the depths and files found in our available repositories. They would be amazed at how much of that is reflected in the online sources we now can access from the seats of our couches while travelling no more distance than from the coffee pot to there.

I will never forget our visit with Mildred and Stephen on a trip we made west visiting other family at the time. They were just like family we’d known for years and years. Mildred brought out a very nice picture and showed us. We looked at it and said, that’s Leonard Allen Becraft. She laughed and revealed it was actually a picture of her Stephen Roe Becraft. It still sticks in my mind and makes me wonder what genealogy will look like years from now as we compare faces with software that will tell us who it thinks the picture is of and we can laugh at the software because we know who it really is.

I still have those letters from Mildred and Stephen. My heart tugs hard to think about what might be a tidbit hidden in those pages, but I’m not quite ready to dig through the emotions that are buried with them.