Most folks call me Kay. A few, like my grandmother, called me Kay-baby. A friend nicknamed me "Special Kay," no connection to the breakfast cereal. My birth certificate lists me as Linda Kay Wheeler. But after a couple of marriages, my last name is now Walker. If you aren't confused by now, you're doing OK.
I was born in Texas a number of years ago (55 or so) and travelled all over the state with my parents (and a year later with my brother) while my dad installed PBX systems in the telephone offices across the central part of this great state of Texas.
I graduated from Wylie High School, just outside of Abilene, TX, in 1971. I had aspirations of going to college, but LOVE seemed more important at that time. So I married and settled down in Abilene for a short time with my husband. Three years later, we had a son, William Max Reed. Three years after that, we had another son, Michael Allan Reed. Two divorces later, I went to the University of North Texas to get the Business degree that I missed out on so many years earlier. I even went on to Texas Tech University to get a Masters degree in Technical Communication. I am now the manager of the Technical Publications Department for Corning Incorporated in Keller, TX.
My sons have also grown up and started families of their own. I guess having a family makes you realize that you want to share information that may be lost when you are gone. When my grandfather became ill with cancer, he developed a burning desire to know more about his family. So he asked me to investigate the stories of how the family came to Texas in a covered wagon from North Carolina. Little did I know that I would still be researching the family genealogy long after he was gone. But that's the way it is. Genealogy research gets into your blood and you dig and dig for those pieces of data that give you an "ahaa" moment, like finding a nugget of gold in the dusty basement of some moldy old courthouse. That's what keeps you going to break those brick walls when an ancestor seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
That's one of the reasons I am so passionate about helping to provide free research material for genealogists online. As I get time, I visit cemeteries in my family's home county in Texas and take a census of those who are resting there. Then I contribute those census records to the Texas Tombstone Project so that perhaps some other researcher will see their ancestor mentioned and shout "Ahaa."
To my family, I hope you all realize how important we are to each other.
To my fellow researchers, happy hunting and good luck.
