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Family pictures
Nov. 7th, 2010 12:41 amMy father sold the house.
That's a saga all its own and not one that I will write about now. But a side effect of his having sold the house is that it needs emptying of (most of (don't ask)) his stuff and the family's accumulated stuff over the nearly 50 years that we were in it.
Up in the attic, today, Susan and I found a number of pictures of family - most especially of my mother.
Not a small number of pictures, at least by my (nuclear) family's standards. Portraits from when she was 1, 2, 3, 4. A variety of pictures with her mother, with her friend, etc. A couple pics from a couple years with her on a pony. Family outings - not scads, but a few. Looks of intense concentration, looks of joy. Very familiar expressions to me, even though they came to me in an older face, decades down the road.
We found her baby scrap book, with a picture of my late great uncle Sam looking dapper and gay, indeed. Her "first business correspondence," a letter from American Telephone & Telegraph congratulating her on her acquisition of stock and encouragement to keep her address updated - along with her father's response to them, noting her relative youth and her hopes that the company will send her dividend checks regularly.
This is stuff I've never seen. Never ever heard discussion of.
Her father died when she was very young - but there are pics of her step-father, as well as of her father.
Was there a birth scrap book of me? Of my siblings? I know that there were pics aplenty of my brother at one point. A few of us - not lots, by any means - odd enough in a family that had camera after camera come into the house.
There's no real direction to this post. I will probably scan a bunch of the photos into the computer at some point, to share with those who care - and there are a few. Meanwhile, though, I am enjoying the look backward, if not so much the questions that twin with it --> Why did my mother's father's family not stay in touch after their son's untimely death? Why was there such a difference in upbringings? My sense has been from other families with whom I deal that there is some degree of consistency in those regards.
*shrugs* these are not questions I have any expectation to have answered - they just wander into and out of my consciousness.
That's a saga all its own and not one that I will write about now. But a side effect of his having sold the house is that it needs emptying of (most of (don't ask)) his stuff and the family's accumulated stuff over the nearly 50 years that we were in it.
Up in the attic, today, Susan and I found a number of pictures of family - most especially of my mother.
Not a small number of pictures, at least by my (nuclear) family's standards. Portraits from when she was 1, 2, 3, 4. A variety of pictures with her mother, with her friend, etc. A couple pics from a couple years with her on a pony. Family outings - not scads, but a few. Looks of intense concentration, looks of joy. Very familiar expressions to me, even though they came to me in an older face, decades down the road.
We found her baby scrap book, with a picture of my late great uncle Sam looking dapper and gay, indeed. Her "first business correspondence," a letter from American Telephone & Telegraph congratulating her on her acquisition of stock and encouragement to keep her address updated - along with her father's response to them, noting her relative youth and her hopes that the company will send her dividend checks regularly.
This is stuff I've never seen. Never ever heard discussion of.
Her father died when she was very young - but there are pics of her step-father, as well as of her father.
Was there a birth scrap book of me? Of my siblings? I know that there were pics aplenty of my brother at one point. A few of us - not lots, by any means - odd enough in a family that had camera after camera come into the house.
There's no real direction to this post. I will probably scan a bunch of the photos into the computer at some point, to share with those who care - and there are a few. Meanwhile, though, I am enjoying the look backward, if not so much the questions that twin with it --> Why did my mother's father's family not stay in touch after their son's untimely death? Why was there such a difference in upbringings? My sense has been from other families with whom I deal that there is some degree of consistency in those regards.
*shrugs* these are not questions I have any expectation to have answered - they just wander into and out of my consciousness.
