Online these days one can find a different Carly Henley who was arrested earlier this year for DWI at the age of 22. Just think, the Carly Henley you came here to read about didn't even get the chance to make such foolish decisions as a 22-year-old.
These days you can also find online Carly Henley's family tree posted at some length, and ostensibly tracing her family name back to 1600, which is an impressive recording to have. Yet a family tree of that breadth contains within it a whole lot of natural voids - actual people who had rich and fulfilling lives of the sorts which were not effectively recorded anywhere. Ancestors who did remarkable things, and who were warm and sincere humans who had it a lot rougher than most of us have had it (they fought in major wars, battled diseases and illnesses with relatively nothing on their sides, and faced a less-educated, more impulsive society all around them). So many of those people are now reduced to a mere date of birth, date of death, and some small documentation which might if we're lucky connect them to both parents and all offspring thus documenting our all important "lines".
Look back there at the record you have for your great-great-grandparent, born before 1900 and try to envision what would be nice to have as your own "records" or those of your children, and then take more time to do the documentation thoroughly in the present so that your efforts will unfold almost as if by reflex when it is time to endure having to clean-out somebody's house once they're gone.
If you knew Carly Henley in person, make this day your reminder and your inspiration to better document and preserve things which connected you to her so that they don't evolve to be lost in the convoluted future which shall be your destiny. It feels like a major advantage to have Carly Henley's individual spirit preserved to some small degree on YouTube, but we're probably wrong to fully "depend" on that being there "forever" (as we now anticipate - because it's easiest that way). How come we haven't even yet recorded the Highline High School assembly video of Carly Henley on our phones, and then presented it "right side up" for the wanting YouTube audience? It seems such a relatively easy task. Yet like so many other things we just keep putting it off - and it never happens.
In recent times this corner has matched some "new family" such that a young child bears a striking resemblance to his great-great-grandmother in a scenario where young parents went from having zero ancestral info on one-quarter of their children to having enough lineage information to parallel Carly Henley's line back to 1600. Yet if a child of 2021 can so much resemble his own great-great-grandmother from 1921, then it is entirely possible, if not likely, that Carly Henley's distinctive look will replicate itself somewhere in the lineage of her siblings. Potentially so much so that they will "know it" when it occurs. If it doesn't occur until they're talking great-great-anything, then it will depend almost entirely upon her family having kept and documented sharp images and passed them along reliably to their next generations.
Sure, photos in the 2000's are far more plentiful, and much better focused than were those of 100 years ago, but maybe not if you don't carefully preserve what you have in order so that it can be there for those who may want to reference it in the future.
Perhaps you too can be inspired by Carly Henley on this date to take a few extra steps to organize and preserve various elements of yourself and your family so that you can be represented in the future by more than a dob, a dod, and a picture on Find A Grave.com.
Speaking of Find a Grave.com, to this day they still have Carly Henley's date of death incorrectly recorded there (because of confusion between 10-6-2010 and 6-10-2010, but still destined to come up wrong, as will her age at death, when somebody off in the distance merely wants accurate details)
If nothing else, let this somber date on the calendar remind you to do that extra record-keeping today, so that you can preserve your family details for future generations, or so that you can better preserve your memories of Carly Henley to be enjoyed for the rest of your lives.
This great link still takes you to Carly's music:
https://thecarlyhenleyproject.bandcamp.com/album/love-the-skin-youre-in
and as always, the lyrics to those songs are linked on the front page of this blog.
That seems like a great place to begin, and/or end, on October 6.
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