My fullest sympathies on "losing" your family that way.... It's tough, very tough fighting losses between brothers and sisters from conflict, and from faith changes of any kind.
But.
Consider instead the Catholic tradition that the Bible is fundamentally God's divinely inspired Truth (capital intended!), but revealed through parables, stories, Teachings, Law, history, birth records, etc.
That is, every Truth in the bible is exactly real and is revealed by the stories, and every story illustrates the Truth in its own way, but every story itself may not be literally the truth.
So, consider then how Genesis exactly follows the sequence of events revealed in the rocks and fossils: every step from the first creation through conversion of energy to light to the condensation of mass, to the formation of the plasmas (waters above), stars (light), planets (shadows can't happen unless mass separates the light from the dark), atmosphere (waters above and waters below), continents and continental (one land, one sea, later divided), first plants, then revelation of the moon and stars as the atmosphere cleared, then birds and insects, then mammals, then domesticated animals, then man.
But how could wandering shepherds know these things and reveal them in their story of creation - tens of centuries before scientists acknowledged them - if they were not divinely inspired truths?
Even as late as the early 1950's "orthodox science" was disputing continental drift, the moon's craters, and interstellar collisions!
Yes, the dates are not "day-by-day. But then again, it IS a "story" of creation, not a "textbook" of creation. Besides, it's a bit difficult to discuss billions of years to a people who had not yet invented the concept of "zero" yet.
I fully agree, and have, in fact, espoused much the same harmonization of evolution and Genesis here on FreeRepublic, generally to be answered with hate by the anti-God crowd and the I-don't-know-about-the-Bible-but have memorized the Cachtsim (sp?) roman catholics and the God-hates-Jews-and-Catholics protestants.
[Consider instead the Catholic tradition that the Bible is fundamentally God's divinely inspired Truth (capital intended!), but revealed through parables, stories, Teachings, Law, history, birth records, etc. That is, every Truth in the bible is exactly real and is revealed by the stories, and every story illustrates the Truth in its own way, but every story itself may not be literally the truth.]
This is EXACTLY what was taught to me during an eight year stint at a Catholic school. It still seems pretty wise to me, 24 years later.