Hi. I was born after Amy Cora Utter died in 1930, so I never knew my aunt.

Amy's sister-in-law, Beulah Beatrice Douthitt Utter (my mother) was in Detroit during Amy's last year of life in the Missouri State Sanatorium at Mt. Vernon in 1930. My mother was hospitalized in Detroit with tuberculosis, but, unlike Amy, she recovered.

My parents and I left Detroit in 1932 and returned to the Heartland, where I remained until I joined the Army.

I married Fred Edwards (Fred L. Edwards Jr.) when I was in the Army and he was in the Marine Corps. I was discharged from the Army and accompanied him during his Marine Corps career. While Fred was a Marine, we and our children lived in more than thirty locations in the United States, including Oahu, Hawaii. He and I also resided in Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa; and Okinawa, Japan.

After Fred's Marine Corps service, he and I became general partners in an international public relations firm for 10 years, where we honed our writing skills. I continue to assist him in editing and revision today.

Two wonderful people brought genealogy into our lives. First was Fred's stepmother, Mary Jane Jennings Edwards, who showed us how to research public records and cemeteries. Family names she brought to us were Burress, Edwards, Head, Murphy and Noble.

Second and most important was my mother, who amassed a collection of newspaper clippings, family bible entries, letters and photographs with names and dates jotted on the back. She also laboriously reviewed the family trees with me during our visits. This brought us information about the Abram, Abraham, Alburty, Carver, Douthitt, Elliott, Witt and Yeager lines. With that background, Fred and I carried on our own research over many years, and developed the lines that we now have on computer.

Upon completion of the work we did for seven years on Utter's Journeys -- TB and Other Tragedies in Rural America's Heartland, we realized that genealogy makes history.