Who Am I?

"What's your mother's maiden name?"  Now there is a question that I have been able to answer for years.  "My mother's  maiden name is Canty."  "How do you spell that?"  I knew the answer to that too.  "C-A-N-T-Y, Canty." 

My mother died when I was five years old.  I had just a few pictures and some information that my father shared with me.  But contact was lost with her family.  Today you can do research with the click of a finger.  In the 1950's, keeping track of each other when they moved away was much more difficult.  For those reasons and perhaps the challenge my father had in raising a five-year old, my mother's Canty family was lost in my life. 

The loss of my mother, Nellie Frances Canty, has affected my entire life.  It has affected the way I raised my children, the choices I have made in spiritual matters and how I view living on a daily basis.  Thankfully, due to the encouragement of a friend, I decided much later in life to to search out my mother's story.   I am finding out in this process  not only who she was and who her family was, but who I am.