My Late Lamented Cousin Shera

Shera Biggers Thomson 1939-2009

Shera and I had a sort of bond that transcended our status as second cousins. We just were so alike and yet so very different.  We had many interests that were the same and many divergent ideas too.

I miss her very much. And on my trip to England just concluded (June 9-30, 2010), there were so many times I thought about sharing an experience with Shera, only to remember she is no longer here to listen and react.  How very sad.

Shera shortly before her final illness, altready thin with unknown disease.

In 1997, Ed and I went with Shera and Kevin for one of our several tours of wineries in the Russian River Valley, but before we left 'Santa Rosa, where they lived, we toured the Peanuts museum of chares Schultz.  Shera is posing beside one of the figures they have artists decorate every year to auction for charity.

Kevin, Snoopy, Shera and Ed, l to r.

There were many Snoopys, all the same yet all different.

The wine country in Sonoma County is very beautiful.

Grapes and more grapes.

In Juy, 2008, Shera met me in San Francisco where I had attended the RWA National Convention. Here Shera and Shari Anton and I were touring the Chihuly exhibition at the SF Museum of Fine Arts.

We loved the colorful collection of his organic-shaped glass.

I hope I can upload some other pictures from other trips we took together, to Kentucky and Southern Illinois and to England to do genealogical research on our common predecessors.

In our grandfather's generation, there were, I think, six Biggers boys. But only two of them had sons, my father, my Uncle Hayward (both sons of Ene Walter Biggers) and Carter, son of E.W.'s brother.

In Shera's and my generation, there was only one male offspring, my brother Jerry Jr. who has no children.   So the genes of the Biggers brothers (and sisters) are carried on though the females of the family -- and there are lots of us!