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first realized the need for family nursing theory while teaching community health nursing to students in the late 1970s. At that time, there was no comprehensive textbook in family nursing, and she used Sobel and Robischon’s (1975) text that had a number of case studies within it that focused on nursing the family. She had a vision to define family nursing as conceptually and empirically distinct from nursing family members. She decided that a family assessment framework for nurses was needed, so she turned to the family sociology literature and developed an assessment tool of her own that focused on the structural – functional aspects of families. After circulating several handouts of this family assessment framework to her community health nursing students, she was encouraged to publish it in a book. Thus