Family Territory

In the past couple of weeks, I've been doing some serious thinking about our family history (or lack thereof). I begged my grandma to keep a notebook and write some things down... her handful of favorite stories even.  I told her she didn't have to make it entertaining, just jot down some notes about the most important details.  But she refuses.

When I was young, she used to tell me story after story about being born in Alaska (back when it was a territory).  She lived in a small town named Cordova.  When I was a teenager, my grandparents took a ferry to Cordova to look at the town and see some other parts of Alaska.  They offered to take me (at the last minute when we were at the ferry dock).  Being a snotty teen, I couldn't imagine a trip wearing the same outfit the whole time.  Now I regret not going.  I wish I could have seen the little house my grandma lived in.  They lived in a big house on the hill.  Originally, the house was built as part of a church property, but the church decided the hill was too steep and difficult to navigate in the snow, so they sold it to my grandma's father and mother.

My grandma's mother had been a nurse, visiting from Illinois, when she met "Mr. Koch" as she called him in her letters.  She ended up moving to Alaska to marry him.  They married in 1918.  My grandma came along about a year and a half later.

My grandma's mother died when my grandma was only six.  Ironically, even though Edna was a nurse, she died of blood poisoning from an infection.  I think that haunts my grandma to this day that she didn't really have a mother around or remember much about her.  Her father hired a housekeeper to help out with raising my grandma.

My grandma's father ran the dairy in town (Lakeside Dairy) and had *the only* horse.  Bill pulled the milk wagon around town, and all of the kids would run out to see him. My great-grandfather also ended up working on the railroad during the war.  The government recruited him to help with it because he was one of the only people around who knew anything about logistics and handling big projects.  He remarried at some point after sending my grandma (when she was 12) to Tacoma to live with her aunt.  She never lived in Alaska again after that.  She met friends and had so much fun in Tacoma, she didn't want to go back home.

Credits: Black Crow kit, Grunge Stamps v.10 & Watercolour Brushes

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

For the past month or so, my grandmother has been in and out of the hospital (mostly in [almost a full month]).  Every day, when we'd go to visit, she'd delight in telling the nurses (or anyone else who would listen), how our family has five generations alive right now.  She is a great-great grandma, and totally proud of it.

Jessica and I have been thinking a lot about family and connections through the generations.  There are too many missing links on all sides of our family trees.  That is the way with absent parents and/or adoptions.  I know that I wish I would have been more interested in the family tree back when I was younger and so many more of the relatives were alive.  Too little, too late.

One thing that I was over-the-moon thrilled about though... my grandma relinquished some of her old photo albums.  She was going to get rid of them (to a thrift store, like she did with a bunch of others [like a stab in the eye with an ice pick]), but since I wanted them, she gave some of them to me.  Yay.

Here are a couple of my treasures that I scanned.

My grandma, mom and uncle (and Joseph the cat) in December of 69

My grandpa in 1939

My grandma in 1939

Grandma in 1938

Grandpa and Grandma (dating) July 6, 1938

Grandpa 7/6/38

Grandpa's cousin, Rosie 7/6/38

And here is a page I created using one of the pictures.  The kit is so fitting.  It is Sissy Sparrows' Room 19: Project 5.  All about relics and vintage goodness (although it is totally versatile and can be used for anything).

Credits: Sissy Sparrows - Room 19: Project 5

What about you?  Are you interested in your family's past?  Vintage photos?  Do you want to find your roots?

Family History & Bucket Lists

As a writer and scrapper (scrapbooker seems like such an awkward word), I am always interested in preserving family history. Part of it could be due to the fact that my family history has always felt somewhat fragmented and sparse. My mom was adopted. I never met my biological father. The dad who raised me had no family history to share. My grandma didn't really have much in the way of family history, and my grandpa apparently didn't either, although he at least had some photos (but my grandma sold them to a thrift store). I'm at an age where this bothers me, so now I have a dilemma.

 Tim's parents were a tad bit on the pack rat side of things. His dad seemingly kept everything. When Al and Gladys moved into an assisted living home, we were tasked with getting their house cleaned out, renovated and sold. We also ended up with all of the stuff that wasn't given to the Goodwill. Right now, we have about a dozen boxes upstairs that are filled with old things. I'm talking about things that go back into the late 1800s and early 1900s. There is an amazing array of ephemera. There are some photos and documents from Germany (Tim's grandfather was German). We don't even know what they are since we don't know German. There are boxes and boxes of loose photos with no names on them or any idea of who the people are. There are playbills from European productions attended by Tim's uncle when he was in the military. There are graduation announcements and programs from Tim's dad/uncles. There are also architectural drawings that Tim's dad and his twin did when they were in high school... on frail paper rolled up into a tube. There are tickets and documents and letters galore. One of the things I found was a stack of letters from Tim's mom to his dad. They are love letters that span a few weeks before the two became engaged, and continue for the first several months of the engagement. Priceless.

 The dilemma is... what to do with everything. Tim's theory is that we should just scan everything so it is digital and then get rid of it. That thought horrifies me. There are some things that are okay being digitized. I agree that everything should be scanned to save the image. But there is such a tactile sensation of holding the ticket or letter or photo and feeling the difference in paper quality or whatever. It is fine to look at a scan of a picture, but quite another to hold a piece of family history in your hand that is over 100 years old.

Somehow we'll figure it all out. But it has been on my mind the past couple of days. I asked some scrap friends about it and no one had a real solution other than to hire an organizer. I was just reading on Kelly Russell Agodon's blog about how poetry and the arts should be archived. Some important words of wisdom there. I have no idea on how to archive my writing.  Ugh.  And those things just really fell in line with thinking about the family stuff. And it also fits together with the scrapping stuff and how strange it is for me to be okay with compiling digital scrap pages. I guess at some point, I figure I will print them out into a book and they will be stored in someone else's upstairs closet in the future. But I also think that things will evolve over time and technology will have a solution for it.

One of the things I'd never really thought about in the past is coming up with a summer bucket list for the family and documenting it. Right now, Kennedy is too small to do much, but I blogged over at One Story Down about the lists and have a huge range of ideas for things to do and how to document them. You can check it out here.

If you have any good ideas on how to preserve memories and archive history, I'd be happy to hear them!

10 Things

So since I nearly forgot about 10 things on the 10th of the month, I am going to do a quick post and use the theme of family (from NaBloPoMo) for my ten things.

Ten things you may or may not know about my family:

Liz & Jessica

• For awhile, I forgot I had a sister.  My sister was born when I was 18 and out of the house, so for a little while, if people asked me if I had siblings, I would only mention my brother.  (Sorry, Lizzy.)  But now I have it under control and will always mention her.  Which leads to...
• My daughter and my sister are the same age.  My sister is two months and a day older than Jessica, so my mom and I were pregnant at the same time.  I swear, Father of the Bride II stole our story, although we didn't go into labor at the same time (obviously). 
• For a little over a year (in 2001-02), my brother and I lived next door to each other, but the only time we really saw each other was when we ran into each other in the grocery store.  
• My grandma is going to be 92 in two months.  Today would have been my grandpa's 100th birthday (if he was still alive).  My grandma is still living on her own, driving, and in good health (in spite of the car accident she had on Wednesday afternoon).  
• My mom and her mom (my grandma) haven't talked in about 24 years.  Lots of old family issues that could never be resolved and came to the breaking point when I was pregnant with my daughter.  They got in a fight then, and weren't even in the same room with each other until my bridal shower sixteen years later (where they ignored each other).  
• My mom was adopted when she was 6.  She was taken from an abusive home and adopted out to my grandparents.  When I was 16, she found out about her birth family.  Every once in awhile she learns something new about them.  One of the "fun" facts is that her biological grandmother participated in the "world's oldest profession."
• My in-laws are about the same age as my grandma.  My MIL is 91 and my FIL is 88.  It seemed sort of strange at first, but they are really really sweet people.
• My step-daughter and step-son moved to and live in Walla Walla, with their mom.  We don't get to see them often nowadays, but when Tim and I first got together, we had one or the other of the kids for several years.  Tim is a great dad, and his kids should feel lucky to have him.  
• My dad committed suicide in May of 2008.  It still bothers me and makes me feel bad.  We weren't close at the time, so I guess that makes me feel even more guilty.  
• He was not my biological dad.  My biological dad (and his family) didn't want to have anything to do with me.  He signed over any rights to me when my mom married and my dad adopted me.  To this day, I have never had any contact with my biological dad.  I don't really care to.  My mom thinks that is odd since it was a big thing for her to find her biological roots. 

So that is that.  

What sorts of oddities do you have in your family tree?

Scrap Saturday: A Month in Photos

Today I spent some time uploading pics from August and July to Flickr.  Frustrating because it wouldn't work as planned, but I think I finally got them uploaded.  Now I need to burn them onto CDs.  This is the first month (in a long time) that I actually printed a big batch of 200 photos.  I made some enlargements for family and then printed a bunch of our NY photos for a future mini album (?).

I ran across a blog "Simple as That" by Rebecca Cooper, and she had a great freebie template available for download for compiling some 'month of' photos.  So I thought I'd take the opportunity to post the template and use this as a starting point for 'things to scrap' in the near future.  It was a great month.  :)

Template courtesy of Rebecca Cooper of Simple as That

From top left:

Mom and Matt at Jessica's birthday dinner
Lucian
Great great uncle Jack and Kennedy
Statue of Liberty
New York skyline from our hotel in Jersey
Jessica and Kennedy smooching
Coney Island
Conan and Grumpa (the day before surgery)
Shannon and Jessica
MFA graduation at FDU (yay!)
Emily

There was so much more to capture, but this is at least a start.  :D

How do you archive your photos?  Do you keep them in multiple places (cd, online, hard drive, etc.)?  Do you print all of your photos?  I'd love some helpful tips/ideas on what to do with all of mine before my external hard drive gets full.  :p