A Rambling Mama

 Growing up, I could have been a better decision-maker. I tended to go with the flow and complained if I didn't like the options. I met my husband at the end of my final year of undergraduate studies, and we became a team and made all our decisions for the next fifteen years together. I mean literally every decision. We had a rule that if it was over $100, we would also discuss purchases; it worked well and took the pressure off of him and me by doing it together. My last big buy without him present ended up in a telephone call to buy an Oculus for our son. I got the impulse to buy one at the store; they were on sale, and I secretly called Keith while Liam played with something. We discussed the pros and cons and whether or not I thought it would have any actual longevity as a purchase; I naturally thought yes, so Keith and I agreed, and I told Liam, and we bought it.  My desktop at the moment, smiles and memories. Now, I'm the sole adult in this family, parenting and doing ev...

Even now, just over four months in, the word widow seems foreign. The first time I used it to describe myself, I cried on the phone to a stranger at the VA. Keith was a central part of my world, and now that world seems smaller and less grand. That world was unbearable in those first few days, but in time, I have learned to manage and carry that pain with me.  Amy & Keith The first days were some of the most challenging days of my life. Without Keith in the world, I could not focus, eat, or understand what was happening and how it was happening. Planning his funeral was one of the worst days. I could not wrap my mind around what I was doing and why. I could not bring myself to the realization that this was happening to us. And still, all I could worry about was Liam and how this affected him.  Now it seems like everyone I know affected by his death is getting back to "normalcy," and we are still back at the beginning, trying to figure it all out. It is strange to suddenly...

My third Great Grandfather, Strother West Roberts, was born on November 1, 1842, in Blaine, Kentucky, the heart of Eastern Kentucky, to John C. and Esther (Abbott) Roberts. Strother’s younger brother, Reuben C. Roberts, was born the following year on April 9, 1844; three more younger brothers and a sister joined the family. Two siblings, including his only sister Martha, died before Strother was ten years old. By the age of Nineteen, the United States had broken down into the Civil War. Both Strother and his younger brother Rueben were enlisted into the Union Army into the 14 th Kentucky Regiment, Company G, at Camp Wallace in Lawrence County, Kentucky. [1] The Union’s 14 th Kentucky Infantry Regiment of the Civil War was a highly accomplished and engaged unit throughout the intense years of the American Civil War. In its three-year tenure, the unit engaged in many battles from their home city of Louisa, Kentucky, to distant battlefields in Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Stro...

             The Revivalist preacher Barton W. Stone was born into a once affluent slaveholding family in Port Tobacco, Maryland, alongside the Port Tobacco Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, in 1772. Following his father’s death at age three, the Stone family soon moved to Virginia, into the heart of Appalachia, where he would spend the rest of his adolescents. In modern terms, Stone’s memory is considered somewhat controversial, but by and large, people remembered Stone as a “cheerful and sometimes even facetious” man of “considerable wit and humor.” [1] Stone was one of many revivalists of the “Restoration Movement,” whose aim was to restore Christian society through the renewal of Biblically-based beliefs and practices of the New Testament. [2]             During the Revolutionary War and the early years of the new republic, Christianity declined, but “one of the practices that the Ame...

            The Great Depression is one of the most challenging periods in American economic history and had national and international influences and origins. In the years following the Great War (WWI) and into the 1920s, the “U.S. economy boomed.” [1] However, tranquility was not on the cards for long as the government interceded in 1928 when the U.S. Federal Reserve “raised interest rates” to “combat inflation.” [2] The timing could not have been worse; Europe was still in a period of rebuilding and establishing new governments for many countries. Ultimately, the burden of the tremendous amount of resources and money loaned by the U.S. to Europe became too much, and many countries began to default on those loans. The result was a slow down of the economy leading to stagnation and the “deflation” of the U.S. economy.             To understand the causes of the Great Depression, we can look to note...