Tag: family

Boxes and Bags and Threads

I have the rest of my mom’s family materials. It’s a lot to unpack.

Last week, someone asked me what genealogy projects I was working on, and I made the mistake of telling the truth out loud.

“Oh not much right now,” I said. “Some stuff has gone quiet, and other projects I’m dragging my feet on.”

I forgot that the ancestors were in the waiting room, and they could hear me. Because I also forgot that I was already planning to take back some boxes of stuff left from when my mom had died.

I sealed my own fate.

The boxes were more of the things I just could not deal with when we cleaned out her apartment. The boxes were hastily packed in 2018, and stashed in my sister’s garage since then. (That sound is a dozen professional archivists rolling their eyes in unison.)

This year, I felt like now was the time to retrieve them. So during my most recent visit we did just that. We dragged out the two boxes and reopened them on my sister’s dining room table for a quick scan and weed.

Yes, that is a tortilla bag.

Pretty quickly, I went from feeling “willing” to “burdened.” It wasn’t just the idea of two more large boxes of unsorted papers and photos from a dozen decades. It was that quite clearly, a significant amount of the photos had not been my mother’s at all. They had come from her last husband—they were HIS family’s photos. 

Which meant I would need to sort them from my mom’s photos, and then find his family members, who I haven’t spoken to since the early 1990s.

It felt like a Jacob Marley chain being laid on my shoulders.

But I also have to do this. I have a situation in my own family, involving photos I may never get to see. It has been a source of tremendous sadness to me. I just can’t do that to someone else.

We tossed a few things and packed it all up. I shipped some, carried some, and this past week I’ve been sorting it all out. Even if I had had time to sort it all in 2018, I couldn’t have. The larger of the two boxes was 28 lbs. of paper and photos. And my mother’s “filing system” was rudimentary at best.

The Stuff, a Partial List:

  • 59 blank postcards, 1900-2000s; everywhere from the White House to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  • About a dozen written postcards, including some from globe-trotting Aunt Edith. Also one slightly racy postcard my mom sent to her husband (ew).
  • A spoon someone stole from the Greenbriar Inn. What!

  • A temperance pamphlet about Thomas Edison.
  • The mortarboard tassel from my sister’s law school graduation.
  • A resume my mom wrote, full of 100% lies about her qualifications and achievements. Definite keeper!
  • The quilt above, made by Edith’s sister Bessie, my great-grandma. I know: It has been in this condition for my whole memory.
  • More old silverware to go with the old silverware we already weren’t using, as well as a set of mini silver salt and pepper shakers.

  • A full shoebox of photos from my mom’s last husband.
  • Six or eight files of genealogy notes written by my great-grandfather and his sons, on fragile onionskin and fastened with rusty paper clips. Sometimes they used shirt pins.

  • Memorial guestbooks from two funerals.
  • Photos, various, c. 1880s-2000s. Most unlabeled. Oh goody.
  • Letters, postcards, manuscripts. Some are important, some are not.
  • This sampler, which might be from WWI or could be from 1976. I have no idea.
  • This doll. Also have no idea.

The good news is that, with my husband’s help, I have already tossed two full grocery bags of stuff. I’m being ruthless with the weeding. Photos without people, photos without recognizable relatives, photos with recognizable relatives but terrible or blurry, a pile of greeting cards—they all go.

So many Polaroids of nothing and no one.

Nothing of value has been lost, so far. And now I can dig into what remains. ☗

© 2024 Tori Brovet/All rights reserved. GraveyardSnoop — at — gmail.com.

I Like Old Stuff: Kurtz’s Ledger

Among my family heirlooms is this ledger, which is basically a handwritten genealogy database.

Long before there was a Family Tree Maker or an Ancestry, my great grandpa used this to track his history.

Wayback Wednesday: Elise, Nancy, and Sarah

Elise, Nancy, and Sarah. 1946

On Wednesdays we go way back. This week’s photo is my mom Nancy (the baby), between her mother Elise (left) and her grandmother Sarah (right).

I love unposed moments like this, when people were just being themselves. But I also can’t see it without some poignancy.

I know what they can’t: That Nancy would adore her grandmother, but struggle with her own mother, all their lives. She was caught between them here, and would be often as she grew up.

Sarah and Elise were actually stepmother/stepdaughter, and their own relationship was frosty.

There’s a lot of frustration in this photo. There’s a lot about love, mothering, disappointment, failure, and the ways we keep trying.

Socials

It’s been a while since I gave an updated list of all the spots where I hang out online.

Follow me, friend me, recommend me. Much appreciated! ☗

17210 Hull Street: Good Water, Cement Sidewalks (2)

1. Department of Corrections

This history of my family’s house on Hull Street—a house I saw only once, in a city I visited just a few times—is never going to be as right as I would like. Too much has been lost in the half-century since my family moved away. Perfect is not an option.

My family knows this as well. They’ve been utterly patient and helpful as I ask them to put a shovel into their old memories. After I published my introduction post, their responses shone with appreciation and added details. But one of my aunts did have a gentle change: “I loved it. But the peonies weren’t along the fence in the yard. I don’t remember where they were, but it wasn’t there.”

So much for my opening line about the peonies starring along the sidewalk fence. I took this news back to my dad, who had drawn me a map of the garden with the peonies there. He shrugged in response, saying, “The peonies were everywhere.”

Perhaps they were. Maybe they’re both right. A garden is forever in flux; memories are only correct for a moment. Memoir is where fact is layered on certainty, at right angles with another half-memory. The stories mesh or they don’t. They run in reinforcing parallels—or they cross each other out and leave you standing in between. The best I can do is overlay fact upon conflicting fact, and hope some shadow of truth appears in the crossing.

As it happens, the intersection is where we begin.

Continue reading “17210 Hull Street: Good Water, Cement Sidewalks (2)”