Our Story

If you ever had the chance to meet my mom, and you asked her about her life, she would have told you about me, and my older sister Maureen.  

From the moment my sister was born, and then me three and a half years later, we were her everything: her whole heart, and her entire world.  She was the most incredible, thoughtful, and devoted mom, and my sister and I will never know how we got so lucky to have her as ours.

She always told my sister and I that having children was the best thing decision she ever made.  Being a mom, being our mom, was her absolute favorite thing and her self-proclaimed greatest achievement.  

If you ever had the chance to meet my mom, and you asked her about her life…

She would have told you about her daughters.  

My mom wouldn’t have told you about her early childhood in Ohio.  She wouldn’t have told you about her school teacher mother and her WWII pilot-turned-architect father, and how they moved their family of eight to Alaska in the 60’s.  

Being the only daughter out of six children, with five brothers both older and younger, would have made for a unique family dynamic even by baby boomer standards, but I doubt you ever heard anything from my mom about that.

If you asked my mom to tell you about her life it’s unlikely she would have talked about her first teaching job after earning her degree in education, or how it made her the fifth consecutive generation of women in her family to be a school teacher.  

When my mom talked about her life, her experiences, her accomplishments, and what she was most proud of, she talked about her daughters.  

Sometimes you just don’t realize how much you want to know about someone until they are no longer there to tell you all of the stories of their life.

My mom had lived nearly half of her life before my sister and I were born, and I wish desperately that I had known to ask her more about that life, while I had the chance to. 

In my grief, I have found comfort in seeing old photographs, from my mom’s life before us.  I have gotten a glimpse of what she was like as a daughter, a sister, a partner, a wife, a teacher, and a friend, and in these photographs I can see how the rare qualities that made her such an incredible parent made her a really special person in the lives of everyone that she let into hers. 

I have chosen to share these images here so that others may see what life was like in rural Alaska so many years ago, through the eyes of someone with a particular appreciation for the small town Alaskan village life she came to know and love: my mom.

There will always be the hope that those pictured in photographs shared here may somehow find this page, and can help in identifying the unknown faces, and are able to share the story behind each image.

Thank you for visiting, viewing, and sharing in the memories with us.