Sometimes the American Dream is as simple as surviving. As a writer once said, "a hero is someone who gets out of bed in the morning." For someone going through cancer treatment that is profoundly true. Tomorrow, Friday, the 23rd, at Alvirne High School, in Hudson, NH join me and other survivors at the Relay for Life. We walk in a circle, cry and eat with each other. It's free it's for us. You can register starting at 5 p.m. It's a profound experience.

So my son is a huge Darren Shan (of Cirque du Freak fame) and he made an appearance at the Boston Public Library today. The man is an excellent writer, but even more, he is a gifted reader and amazingly generous with his time for his fans. His apperance was free to those attending. He promised and delivered on the promise to sign every book someone brought with them - and by the way, he not only signed his signature, but also added quotes and comments. My son brought 24 of his treasured tomes which he schlepped in a backpack throughout Boston. As authors and reporters, my husband and I have both done a lot of readings, but this guy is the gold standard for public appearances. He was warm, genuine and animated beyond compare. We hope he does his own recorded books. No one else should read these aloud but him. We loved his message that teens - and adults for that matter - shouldn't just read one genre, or they might miss important allusions and references in books. His, for example, are influenced by no less an eclectic crew as Twain, King, and Dickens to name a few. And did we mention his great English accent with Irish overtones? The next time you can see Darren Shan read, don't miss him. Here's a photos of him with my son.

I've joined a group of knitters, crocheters, needle pointers and quilters at my local library and it's been an amazing experience which goes for beyond the baby blanket I've been working on for three months.
Only a handful of women today – none of whom I’ve met, but all of whom look somehow familiar – as if this type of woman – women who want to use their hands to make object for themselves and others, all have something familiar in common. Do I have those qualities? I probably haven’t been at it long enough yet. Or perhaps I resist - not wanting to be that retired woman with loads of time on their hands – on their hands. That’s an interesting turn of phrase. These are women with time on their hands but they use hands to turn time into these solid objects. Once again I can’t remember their names, and I bet they don’t remember mine, although one woman - I do remember her come to think of it, with an amazing wrinkled face as if she spent her entire life outside, she said she liked my article the other day. I’m amazed that all these women are so welcoming to me and so generous with their time and advice. I’m a stranger. I’m much younger – even at 53 – and I’m a reporter. That must be freaky to them. Maybe that’s why I go, because this is one of the few places I go, that I’m the youngest person in the room. A lot of these women have children my age and grandchildren my son’s age. They are so past the puberty issues and running kids to activities which I’m dealing. It’s refreshing. We had a great chat about marriage the other day, all starting with this one woman who was making floppy crocheted hats. She gave me the pattern, and let me use one of her hooks. Anyway we started talking about the hats. And this other woman who is absolutely gorgeous despite of or because of her age, said, “Remember when we went on our honeymoons and we had had to have the right hat? I jumped in with “remember when everyone wore picture hats at their weddings?” And I met with a few confused stares.
“I had a pill box hat,” said the gorgeous woman. Of course I jumped to Jackie Kennedy and realized this woman married when Jackie set the fashion – it had to be the early 60s. The picture hats would have been worn at her daughters’ weddings. I was off a generation.

I asked the woman who made the floppy hats how long she’d been married. “Forty-four years.” “You mean you’ve only had sex with one man your whole life?” I asked realizing I had probably breached knitting decorum. “Yes,” she said, looking as if she just had a great tumble in the hay. The pretty woman said “that’s the way we did it. We were virgins when we married and we stayed with the same person.” She told me her husband had died after 37 years of marriage. I don’t know how long ago that was but her heart was still broken –it was obvious.

I felt ashamed that I had brought it all up, all glib and reportery, but these women wouldn’t let me feel badly. Instead they went with it – talking about their marriages and their children’s marriages. The woman next to me who had barely said anything was working on a hand-stitched quilt. She wore little jack-o-lantern earrings. She showed me her purse – one of those black canvas bags with a plastic window in front which contained a photograph of a sprite – with red hair and big brown eyes. “This is my great-granddaughter.” That’s all she said. I told her the girl was adorable and I wasn’t lying.
I fished in my purse to find a photo of my son, but as usual I didn’t have one. What’s with me with that? It’s like a superstition or something or maybe the idea that he is so beautiful and precious to me a photo would be woefully inadequate. I’ll try to remember to put a photo of him in my purse the next time.
The women again were talking about the way things used to be – not with nostalgia or that air that their way was the right way, just that things were different.
“We tried to set such good examples, said Irene – the only woman whose name I knew. Irene was the experienced one in the crowd. Divorced once, married twice. “We didn’t want our kids to think it was ok to live with someone. Now all of our kids have lived with someone before they got married. “My granddaughter was the bridesmaid at her mother’s wedding,” said the 44-year marriage veteran.
“What were we worried about? It all turned out ok. It was just different. That’s all. Just different.”

I know making it to Broadway or even the local community acting troupe is a legitimate American dream that members of my own family have had and still have. But I am so over spelling "theater" - "t-h-e-a-t-r-e." Is it supposed to sound more artsy? Call me a creatre of habit. It rubs me the wrong way.

This is a copy of my column in Monday's Nashua Telegraph

This is a photo of my father with his father shortly after my father's mother died in the early 1920's. >

As everyone knows by now, it’s U.S. census time. You have either filled out your form and sent it back, are about to fill out your form, or a Census worker will visit your home. But things were a lot different 100 years ago when the 1910 census was taken. How do I know? I’ve looked at dozens of pages of that 100-year-old census on my quest to do genealogical research and to do it for free or nearly free.

We are lucky that in the Nashua area there are a lot of resources that make this fairly easy to do. In the past week, I’ve accumulated historical information about family that would have taken me months and a lot of traveling expenses 10 or 15 years ago, and I never traveled more than a mile and a half away from my home.

Inspired by the new NBC show, “Who Do You Think You Are?,” which follows celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Emmitt Smith as they research their family history, I decided to go on my own ancestral journey.

I followed the lead of the show and started tracing a single member of my family and followed that person as far back as I could. I didn’t tackle all my grandparents or great-grandparents at the same time. I also noticed that the show was sponsored by Ancestry.com, which boasts 4 billion online records and is the most popular commercial genealogical Web site out there. It’s very convenient and easy to use, but it’s also pricey: ranging from $20-$30 a month, depending on the package.

Many public libraries, including Nashua and the Rodgers Memorial Library in Hudson, have the library version of Ancestry.com called Ancestry Library Edition, which can be accessed in the library only.

You can also access some other genealogy databases in-house and those available to the libraries from home, online with a library card.

“The genealogy databases are very popular,” said Rodgers’ reference librarian Gayle St. Cyr. “Every once in a while you’ll hear someone shouting out ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ when they find that little piece of information about an ancestor they’ve been searching for.”

The Nashua Public Library periodically offers a free class on using computers to research genealogy. The next will be April 21, from 2:30-4 p.m., and registration is required.

Since my father’s mother died when he was a very young, and my father has been dead since 1980, I knew practically nothing about my paternal grandmother, so I decided I’d look for her. I wasn’t even sure of her proper name. I only knew that she was called Lulu, which someone had once told me was short for Louise. One of my brothers and I both thought her last name might have been Von Adolph, but we weren’t sure. And we also thought she had died in childbirth at a young age and that the child did not survive either. I also knew my father was born at home in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1918.

I started at home on my laptop by Googling the “best free genealogical websites.” I started with HeritageQuest online.com.

An hour or so later, I was able to come up with a scanned-in copy of the 1920 Census that showed my father as a 22-month-old living in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his father, Joseph, and his mother whose name was shown as Louvize. The census also showed that Louvize was born in California and that her mother and father (whose names were not on the census) were both born in Missouri.

On one site, I saw a popup with this information; on the other, Heritage, I could pull up an actual scanned copy of the census. At that time, all census data collection was done in person, written by hand. Fortunately for me, the census taker, Anna Gould, used legible cursive. I have to say there is something thrilling about seeing the actual handwriting of the person who was looking at my father as a baby, who was in the room with my grandfather and grandmother, whom I never met, and who would both be dead before the next census was taken. In a weird way, it was like visiting with them.

From there I was determined to find out more about Louvize Milbouer, and I’d gone as far as I could on my own. The 1910 census had no record of her as far as I could find. I knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had Family History Centers throughout the country and that one was here in Nashua on Concord Street. There I met Helen Ullmann, the assistant director of the history center, who explained why the church focused so much on genealogy.

“Mormons believe in life after death,” she said, “and we believe after death, people are organized by families, so then genealogy becomes very important.”

She explained that in the Mormon church, baptism and other “saving ordinances,” such as sealing marriages, must be made accessible to everyone who has ever lived and to make them available to people who did not go through when they were alive, they can be done by proxy. Because of that genealogical research is done so that relatives who were not baptized into the church when they were living can be baptized by proxy in death by a stand-in or proxy living relative.

So the church began collecting genealogical research resources and allows anyone to use them, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Not only can you get help at the Family History Centers, like the one in Nashua, but also on the Church’s genealogical Web site, FamilySearch.org, which is free to use from home. I needed Ullmann’s help and she was more than generous with her time. Initially, she couldn’t find out any more online about Louvise than I could, but she knew where to look to gather more information. After an hour, we still couldn’t find her maiden name – which is key to go further back in time. But she didn’t give up. She searched through various databases, censuses and cemetery listings.

“It’s always best to start with the latest information and move backward in time,” she said, suggesting I get copies of my grandparents’ marriage certificate and my grandmother’s death certificate in hopes of finding her last name and maybe more. She found where those documents could be ordered and filled out the order forms with me. The documents cost $5 each, a mere pittance compared to a subscription to Ancestry.com, which might or might not have that same information.

But the documents had to be delivered the old-fashion way, by mail and not instantly on a computer. I was bummed. I may have lived 53 years without knowing anything about my grandmother, but once I started looking, I wanted to know everything at once.

But fortunately for me, a man named Bill, a passionate amateur genealogist and regular at the Family History Center, came to my rescue.

He suggested I look on another free Web site called Cyndi’s List – a treasure trove of genealogical resources, including, said Bill (who chose not to tell me his last name), a bride and groom registry. For a few minutes, I had no luck finding a groom named Joseph Milbouer and his bride Louvize, but then I remembered that so many people have misspelled our family name with an “a” instead of a “u.” Bingo. There was my grandfather, Joseph, in the groom directory and the date that he married Louvize Adolph – Dec. 19, 1914, in Manhattan. So my grandmother had a last name and now my search for her could begin in earnest. Bill and Ullmann using the same Web site also found out that my grandmother died July 31, 1921, at age 28, when my father was 3 years old. With Ullmann’s help, I ordered a copy of Louvize’s death certificate to see if it were true that she and the baby she was carrying died in childbirth. I also ordered a copy of my grandparents’ marriage certificate.

But this is not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning. Bill, my newfound friend from the Family History Center, said it all.

“Twenty-one years ago all I knew was that my family came from Ireland and nothing else,” Bill said. “I haven’t stopped researching since. It’s an obsession.”