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This is Mama on the left, and Lilly on the right.Back in December, I was the Guest Babe Of The Month over at 7 Babes A Blogging. As the guest blogger, I had to write at least one post per week. While I was trying to figure out what to write, I went to my mother’s 80th birthday party. I came home from that party and wroteA Tribute To My Mother. (this site is now defunct, sorry) I didn’t think much more about it, until this week.
On Sunday, Mama called me and told me that she got a phone call from her niece that she has not heard from in 44 years. Susan, my cousin, is the daughter of Mama’s sister, Lilly, who died in 1963 from an aneurysm. Susan was 12 years old when her mother died, and went to live in Oklahoma with her paternal grandmother, and never saw her relatives in Michigan again after that. She said she has tried for years to find them, but did not ever know any last names except for Grandmother Brouch, Mama’s mother.
Susan’s husband has been searching the internet off and on for several years, and Saturday night he googled “brouch michigan” and one of the sites that came up was 7 Babes A Blogging, the site where I was the guest blogger for December. When he clicked on that link and found my post, he knew right away he had found the right family. When he showed it to my cousin and she saw the pictures of Mama on that post, she said they looked so much like her own mother that she knew it, too. So, they looked up phone numbers for Strouds in Douglasville, and the first one she called was Mama.
When Mama called me, she was THRILLED! She was so happy. She did not know I had written about her. Mama told me that she had often wondered over the years what had become of her sister’s children. Then she asked me, Did you really write a tribute to me? and I said yes, and she said, “I never knew you felt that way about me.” Well, gee, she IS my mother!
So, Susan called me last night and she thanked me over and over for writing that blog, because she has found her family after all this time. She also told me that she has been trying to duplicate her mother’s stuffed cabbage all her life, and now she knows that she has found the right recipe.
This is not the first time our family has been reunited through the internet. Back in 1979, my youngest brother, Bobby, died in an accident. At the time of his death, he had a six month old daughter. After he died, his widow would not allow any of us to visit with her child, and we lost track of her. Earlier this year, my sister joined MySpace. She decided to do a search to see if maybe our niece was a member there. Sure enough, there she was. And since she had a very unusual first name, we knew it was her. She was in the Air Force, stationed in Arizona.
When my sister contacted her, she was delighted to find out she had such a large family, and when she came home to Georgia to visit in July, she was the guest of honor at a party to introduce her to the whole gang.
My sister also found our older brother’s two children from his first marriage. They are both living in California. While they have not visited us, yet, we do keep in touch with them through MySpace. I think we have found everyone now. How Exciting!
