Welcome, Friends, to our Journeys Page!

Journeys:

As Charles Dickens once said in his amazing novel, A Tale of Two Cities, we can sometimes have both “the best and the worst of times”. Journeys are like that. Adventures seldom go in a straight line. Most often they go up and down, winding toward their conclusion.

A Journey:

“A Lift For The Spirit In These Difficult Days!”

 

I wanted to write something to lift people’s spirits in these difficult days.

I’ve journeyed far and have had an uphill climb as of late. Days of trouble have sent me to my knees in prayer. I’ve looked for divine comfort during these days when there has been little comfort to be found on earth.

I won’t call upon any grand philosophical ideas to solve the world’s problems because it was one small thing that led to a lightening of my load the other day–one small thing I thought I’d share with you.

Many times, I’ve written about my journeys here; but recently a most unexpected visitor came to see me. This person did not knock on my door in the usual way. This person came to me as I was waking from a peaceful night’s sleep.

They introduced themselves there in my bedroom. Now before you panic, I must warn you this was a “supernatural” occurrence, so that if you don’t believe in those things, you can stop reading now.

I was asleep, but I was awoken by a woman’s voice. She spoke to me with the sweetest tone of voice–both cheerful and enthusiastic. She said, “Hello! I’m Lola Lasley!”

Upon hearing this, I was wide awake. I muttered a faint “Hello,” and sat up in bed.

Now for many of you, this kind of thing might freak you out or worry you to distraction. I’ve been inspired before by whispers from the spiritual realm, but never by a stranger with such a distinctive name.

I said, “Well, Lola Lasley, you have a remarkable name, one I won’t soon forget.”

I didn’t get any reaction to my statement, so I did what I usually do when I awake with a name or a phrase in my mind.

I Googled it!

Sure enough, Lola Lasley is a real person! She was alive in America, and in her prime in the early 1900’s. There is a beautiful picture of her online–one when she was an adult and also one of her as a child. She was lovely!

I wondered to myself. Why on earth did Lola Lasley come to visit me? She was from the opposite part of the country with no apparent familial connections to me; nevertheless, I thought I’d root around and see what I could find out about her.

I stumbled upon a short article written about her husband in a book that compiled biographies of successful businessmen in Greensboro, North Carolina. (History of North Carolina: Volume VI, North Carolina Biography, by Special Staff of Writers, the Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1919, pg. 113-116.)

I’ve never been to Greensboro, nor to North Carolina, but I was interested when I saw the name of this town as I had written a play about the Civil War, years ago, and had coincidentally set the play in Greensboro, North Carolina!

As I was reading the bio on Lola Lasley’s husband, I noticed a rather large photograph of a man nearby to her husband’s bio. The picture had a caption underneath it. The man’s name was Sidney Reese Morrison. Now, “Morrison” is one of my family names, so I was interested to read this man’s biography. In this short biography, it lays out Sidney’s familial connections back to the early 1700’s. There were more than 20 names of his family members in that short biography!

Wondering if these Morrisons could be related to me, I jotted down their names, and etc., on some note cards.

I did a little digging and found out that the family had immigrated from Scotland into Ireland, and some years later they immigrated into America–decades before the Revolutionary War. So they go way back in the history of this nation.

According to legend: about the time these Morrisons immigrated into Ireland, the King of England had issued a “Letter of Fire and Sword.” In essence, the leader of England decided to cleanse the Hebrides, (islands on the West Coast of Scotland) of any member of the Morrison Clan!

He killed their chieftains and set fire to their homes and places of business. He burned their records, and many of the Morrisons had to flee for their lives. They scattered, and if you descend from the Morrisons of the Hebrides your ancestral family was forced to go live someplace else.

I have no way to prove that the Sidney Reese Morrison family is related to my Morrison ancestors, but the chance exists that they are.

I decided to check out a genealogical site that I frequent to see if Sidney and the 20 + other names had been entered into the system. Out of those names, only a handful were in the system. So I entered their information, based on what I found in this book, into the genealogical records. If their descendants go looking for information on their family on this particular family history website, now they can find it!

It was a little thing for me to have spent an hour entering this information into the system.

I also googled Sidney Reese Morrison’s name to try to find this book by searching for him. This particular book did not come up associated with his name on Google.

Then I understood why it had to be Lola Lasley who introduced herself. She knew that I would go looking to find her, and subsequently find a lost branch of my family tree.

It’s understandable if it’s a stretch for you to believe in life after death. For me, it’s not a stretch because of a near death experience I had years ago.

That’s probably why Lola chose to visit me. She knew that I would believe someone from the past could journey through the spiritual realm to my bedside, and she knew that I would go searching for her.

If you are a descendant of Lola’s, it was a real pleasure meeting your ancestor. She is lovely! I look forward to the day when I can thank her for helping to restore some of the relatives’ names that were missing from my family tree.

Thank you, God, for allowing Lola to journey to my bedside and so graciously say, “Hello! I’m Lola Lasley!”