While visiting Montreal and Upstate New York for summer vacation, my family were greeted by an unhappy surprise.

My mother has Stage 4 cancer.

I’ve been spending the past two to three years researching my ancestry (at, you guessed it, ancestry.com) and I had already hoped to talk with my mother about her memories of our Irish and French Canadian heritage.

I’d already managed to find quite bit online via various databases, both public and private. But there’s no substitute for family stories. And now I have a time limit.

I’ve found quite a few interesting stories in our family tree, which really is much more like a forest, including the Irish, Welsh, English, Scottish, French, Quebecois, German, and possibly Jewish, Native American, and Polish.

So over the next few months I’ll slowly be posting some of the more interesting individual stories from my family’s (families’) histories. Some are more mundane than others. Some are so good that movies should be made from them.

Hope you look forward to reading them!

(And, no, I haven’t stopped the science fiction novel. Work proceeds apace!)