When growing up, many of my relatives lived in Winchester too. We had a very close family life. Aunts, uncles and cousins were part of our daily life. My father worked as a banker in Winchester. I rode my bike home every school day to eat lunch with my parents when I was in elementary school.
However, when the children of my parents' generation went off to college, our Winchester relatives started to move all over the country for schools and jobs.
I also moved away from Winchester and gradually began to lose frequent contact with my relatives. I would see some of them at weddings and more frequently at funerals. But we lost our ability to be easily in touch. It was hard to keep up with their changing phone numbers and addresses.
However, I started using the social networking site, Facebook, last year and am reconnecting with my relatives. For example, Mike Ambrose, my brother's son, now lives in Palm Springs, CA. I had not seen him in many years. Now, I interact frequently with him on Facebook.
My sister's son, Mark, is married and living with his wife and two young daughters in Miami. Tragically, his three year old autistic son drowned in a canal near their home last summer. I was able to be present at the heart breaking service for him held at a church in Kendall, Florida. It was video streamed over the Internet. I was glad to have been able to attend in that way. It felt very much as though I was there in person.
Facebook also now has a family application with which you can add relatives and define their relationship to you so family members can see how they are related and can easily contact each other.
My sister Carole has a daughter, Cindy. One of Cindy's daughters, Maria, graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in Marine Biology a few years ago. I saw her at a family reunion a couple of years ago, but have been out of touch with her for years. She told me during her undergrad years at U. Miami, on most Thursday nights she was at South Beach.
However, with Facebook I now am connected to her again. I see current pictures of her and now know she is getting a masters degree at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in Biology and is living close to where my parents used to live. After graduation from U. Miami, she did research on declining rodents native to the Florida Keys and now is doing research on sea turtles
Maria shot a video of sea turtles hatching and posted it on her her Facebook account. It is password protected so I cannot share it here.
I also now know she is going to Australia to a Sea Turtle conference to present results of her research and she will be scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
She is also learning Salsa:
The technology of Facebook now enables us to easily be connected to friends and family who are dispersed across the world.
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