I
love old photos. My second cousin, who owns a shoe store in Kearney, NE., has a
collection of family photos from the Beavers side of my mother’s clan on
display around his store. Let me tell you, some of my ancestors had pretty
interesting mustaches and one of my
sisters tells me I bear a strong resemblance to our maternal grandmother, who I
think looks remarkably like HER maternal grandmother.
Too
many of us don’t label our photos and now that digital photography is all the
rage, we better hope Flickr and Facebook stay around forever because that’s
where the bulk of our photos reside. Take some time and have your best photos
printed. Then label them as to what they are so future generations know. And if
you have photos of others that don’t have meaning for you any more….or you need
to clean house….send them the photos rather than toss them out. You’ll be glad
you did.
My
father’s family for years had a family letter and if I get my act together
we’ll have another one. I’ve been promising to start it up for a number of
months now so perhaps this blog post will spur me to action. Each person on the
family list writes a letter and sends it to the next person and on and on. When
the envelope full of letters comes back to you, you remove your letter (and
hopefully save it!), put a new one in and send the packet along. It’s a really
interesting way to stay in touch with distant relatives and it is a bit of
history that can’t be duplicated any other way.
As I
said in a previous post, I keep scrapbooks. The ones about my husband’s career
all have items glued in them, but for my son and myself, I’ve taken to using
plastic sleeves that I can simply slide information into. Gluing takes a lot of
time—I have about six year’s worth of Tom’s things to put into the latest scrap
book—but the versions with plastic sleeves are easy to use AND to retrieve
items from should you wish to photo copy them.
The
History Center has been “gifted” with a number of scrapbooks over the years and
they are wonderful additions to our collection.
Nellie Bee Maloley has been keeping scrapbooks about the Festival of
Gingerbread for years and this year donated them to the museum.
Our
exhibitor, Randy Elliott, and I were talking about high school yearbooks
yesterday and I made the comment that for some reason many yearbooks in my
hometown were thrown out over the years and thus it became necessary, when our high
school alumni association decided to collect items about the history of the
school district, to go hunting for yearbooks. I still have mine on the shelf
beside my desk thanks in large part to folks from my past popping up on
Facebook. I still look like I did in high school. Why don’t they?
Over
Thanksgiving, my husband’s aunt pulled out a file of papers and photos of
family members and events to pass along some information to him. I don’t know
if there was rhyme nor reason to how she had these things filed, but that accordion
file was a plethora of information about the past. I found out Tom’s uncle bore
a striking resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio when Jim was in high school and
that he’d been editor of the yearbook. Tom is researching Archbishop of
Canterbury William Sancroft’s sister, from whom Tom’s family is descended, and
so much of the research that Kate, Tom’s mother, had already completed and
passed onto her sister was in the folder also. Tom’s second cousin, also Kate,
was interested in genealogy while still in middle school and spent some time as
a teenager researching family. She was able to fill in a couple of gaps in the
material and it was interesting to see the connection between two people 40
years apart in age as they talked about their ancestors.
As
much as I love my computer, and couldn’t live without it, there are limitations
to keeping everything “on line”. Make a New Year’s resolution NOW to start
collecting and preserving family history.
You’ll be glad that you did and you’ll have a great gift for someone one
day.
