A Story in Many Parts

I have a story to tell, one that has many parts.  This story is really the main reason I started researching my family tree.  Yet, I am struggling as I try to bring it from pen to paper or in this case from keyboard to the World Wide Web.  Those of you who know me realize I am a no nonsense kind of person. (All are entitled to the beliefs we hold close but I am definitely the Scully character in life's X-Files.) I love to bake bread, educate children, and walk grassy roads. But, against character I found the place I have long called home in a dream.

It was the early 1970s and I as well as thousands of other young people were searching for a connection to the land.  A place that was not part of the life of "little houses made of ticky tacky" or in my case a mobile home in a trailer park at the next military base.  Jenny Wren's daddy was in grad school at the best university in Florida, UF, and the beauty of Alachua County won our hearts.  His family was from south Florida, mine was from the Tampa area; we knew no one from the area nor any reason to make Alachua County home but we really wanted to "get back to the land".

So, we began looking; following each house for sale ad in the newspaper that seemed to fit our check list.  The first place we set our hearts on was in the Newnansville area. We thought the most beautiful part of Alachua County was the rolling hills found in Alachua and High Springs.  When that deal fell through, we looked along the road from Gainesville to Williston.  Then, I had a dream.  Actually I had the dream more than once.  In my dream, I saw a white wooden house (I thought two stories), set back on a grassy driveway with large trees along the drive.  We had not seen a house like that nor was there one with that description in  the house for sale section of the paper.  But, hidden in a different part of the ads (I think it was in the Help Wanted but I do not remember) was a house for sale in a part of Alachua County unknown to us.  Where exactly was 219A? 

Once we got directions, we had to wait for the agent to meet us. ( The lady selling the house did not want anyone coming without the realtor present.) So, we were escorted up a grassy driveway lined with alternating magnolia and long leaf pine trees to a white house with high ceilings. And there it was, the house of my dreams.  Yet, this is not the most unusual part of this story.

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