The triggering town that turned into a metropolis

It's my husband's fault, really. I was minding my own business and he was over there on his laptop doing genealogical research. He had just discovered Ancestry.com and was having a grand time researching his family tree, which branches all the way back to the Mayflower. I was not interested in his history--or my own for that matter--but I was intrigued by the technology behind what he was finding. I just wanted to see how the site worked and how did they get that many records digitized? As a test, I just did a simple search for my grandmother, whom I had known until she died when I was 22. Here's what came up:

Yeah, what I found was about as interesting as that looks. Until I looked closer. Where was my grandmother and her father, my great-grandfather?! In 1920, my grandmother should have been living with her siblings and her parents in Minneapolis, but she was missing in this record from the Bureau of the Census and so was her father. Oh, the rest of the people I knew about were there--Violet and Everett and my great-grandmother Christina, for whom I am named. Was great-grandfather dead by then? And what about the grandmother I had known? She would have been 16 that year, so why wasn't she listed with the family? And that's where my current story began--with those questions.

I have never read Richard Hugo's book "The Triggering Town" (Essays and Lectures on Poetry and Writing), but I was introduced to the concept by my own writing mentor, Natalie Goldberg. You'll hear a lot more about her in this blog if you stick around to take a tour with me of all the ideas that have inspired my writing over these past 40 years. Thanks for stopping by.