New Profile Picture and Some More Things...

Updated my blog with a new picture on the front. This is actually one from my father's collection of old photos. His parents, my grandparents Daniel & Muriel Kinnaly are featured here in this photograph on their wedding day. It was June 17th 1941... which would make it 70 years ago to this very day. Grampa and Nana are at center with both sets of my great grandparents on either side.

I'm very blessed to have this nice piece of genealogy in my collection. 1941 was actually a significant year for family history in a couple of different ways. Grampa and Nana's first child, my father's oldest sister and my Aunt Mary (born the year after in 1942) was married to a very good man who happened to be born in 1941. Patrick Francis ("Frank") Lavigne... my uncle Frank.

I lost my uncle Frank this past winter. He passed away on December 31st... nine months after having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Frank did rather well... he was given 3 to 6 months to live and actually seemed to be improving in health through the aggressive treatments he was offered. That six month mark came and went and I think we all were pretty confident that he would beat the odds and live for several more years.

But cancer is a wild beast, too unpredictable it seems. Evidently, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Frank took a very quick turn for the worse. I will never forget that morning... December 31st... I was off work for a long holiday weekend... sitting in my room, relaxing with a cup of coffee... my dad knocked on the door, came in and told me... "Just got a call from Eileen." He didn't need to say any more. Eileen is the middle sibling in my dad's family. Uncle Frank had passed... and less than two months away from his 70th birthday.

I will always miss Uncle Frank. I knew him well when I was a child growing up, saw him often on trips to New England with the family... even tipped him over in a rowboat on a lake in Maine one time when I was 6 years old (a story we laughed about often over the years). We grew slightly apart later as I did not see him or Aunt Mary at all for several years between 1995 and 2006... but in those last few years between '06 and 2010, I made it a point to go and re-visit with my New England-dwelling part of the family more and more often and we got to know each other again. And he is still probably one of my favorite relatives outside of my immediate family.

Alright, this went on for a little bit longer than I intended it to. Storms outside so I should close down the laptop for now...