What IF

Have you ever found yourself wondering how your life might have been IF? Occasionally I find myself in that boat. Over the last few years I have spent considerable time working on the genealogy of both sides of my family. We do not have a very big family because folks in our families have not had very many children. But, I digress, back to my earlier point. My Mom was not a very healthy youngster. As a child she had rheumatic fever and became quite ill in first grade. She related to me that one cold winter day as she and the other children around walked home from school quite suddenly she could go no farther. The kids ran to fetch her father from the point he awaited their arrival as they walked home. They brought him and he carried her home. She never returned to school that school year and lost the ability to walk having to relearn. Perhaps this bout of illness left her with some physical weaknesses, who knows?? But, when she married and she and my Dad started trying to have a family she lost her first two babies. I am the oldest living child, however, I am not the oldest. I actually have an older brother.

So, as I mentioned I sometimes find myself wondering what life might have been like or how life might have been different had my older brother grown up with me. Or what it might be like to have two brothers, one older and one younger than I living at the same time as I.