The Healing Journey

May 21, 2025

Cynthia inherited the box of family photos from her mother, Betty, the youngest of nine children. That was quite a responsibility because in those photos were stored countless memories and stories. She was probably the right person for the job because when she was growing up, her mother would go through the photos one by one and tell her stories that were more enchanting with each retelling — stories that made her deceased relatives come alive.

“I inherited that box of photos, which makes me the family photo person!” she says. “Besides that, after my boys went to school and I was still an at-home mom, I got into our family genealogy. That was the late 1980s and early 90s, when there were no personal computers.”

Looking into the lives of her ancestors led to some startling discoveries.

“First, my mother had come across a write-up of her maternal family background and that our first settlers in this country came to Stratford and Norwalk,” she recalled. “So I went to the Norwalk Historical Society and asked if they had anything about ‘John Gregory’ there, and she proceeded to show me a whole shelf or two about him. It turns out he was one of the first settlers of Norwalk. Small world.”

“I got shoulder deep into studying my mother’s maternal genealogy since I could go back so far in the United States,” she said. “My father came right off the boat from Germany at 12 years old. I had mail going out and coming in almost daily to libraries, historical societies and archives. I also got on my remaining oldest aunts about their memories.”

And all this began from perusing a collection of family photos of those who had gone before her.

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