Sometimes current news is the most startling...

As I work on my family history, I make sure to document stuff about myself.

I've been married five times. To four men, which means I recycled one husband, but I did the time, so I count it.

I was getting ready to do a series of posts going back a few generations for each of my husbands' families.

My first and last husbands are the ones about whose families I know the least. So I started working on the first husband first. We had no children together, and were divorced - very amicably - in 1981. I have not seen or heard from him since the day I called him to tell him I was putting the proposed order in the mail to him for his signature.

As I worked on his tree, I could not for the life of me remember his mother's maiden name. (She died in 2005.) I found his older sister on Facebook, and pm'd her. Have not heard back from her, so this morning, I thought I'd run him through the Ancestry US Public Records indices to see if I could find him and ask him myself.

I found him in St. Charles, MO in 1995. Clicked on that record, and was shocked.

One of the hints for it was the Social Security Death Index. Robert Lee Venable died on 15 May 2011, at the age of 58.

I was totally unprepared for that result. Although we had no contact at all for over 30 years, I was saddened.

That feeling has not left me all day.

I remember Robert as a kind man, with a sense of humor all his own - a man who cared deeply about his family. I was his second wife, and he was nearly 7 years older than I. He had two adorable daughters with his first wife. The oldest would be in her 40s now.

58 is just too young to die.