Family Treasures

Tiffany Window, St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Charleston, S.C.

Today while continuing to de-clutter the house my father-in-law has decided to sell, I worked on the bookshelf that is in the family/sun room.  It is an unusual bookcase in that it has a pair of louvered doors that shut with a hook to hold them closed.  It makes for a neat appearance which for bookshelves that are used for books and papers is quite convenient. 

During the course of my sorting, I found some treasures.  First, I found a photo album that contained photos of my father-in-law during his WWII service.  How young and handsome he looked; indeed, how young all the servicemen looked!  We have one photo of Dad in his uniform, but I hit the mother lode with this album.  Then there was another album that chronicled the wedding trip made by Dad and Mom.  Coincidentally, Dad had just been talking about one day of that trip that they spent at Williamsburg, VA.  Knowing they were married during the war, I never realized they had been able to have any kind of a honeymoon.  The third album was beneath those two and featured my mother-in-law.  The photographs (all of these photos were in black and white, of course) were mounted on black paper on which Mom had written the identifying notations with white ink in lovely cursive.  Remember when cursive was taught and one had to fill workbooks with loops and circles?  It paid off for Mom.  What surprised me was that her album was dated 1939 which was several years before her marriage.  It made me wonder if there were other early family albums to be found. 

The surprises weren't over, though.  On the same shelf I found David's baby book!  It made me laugh - oh, not because of his baby pictures but because his mother was no better at writing everything down than I was when my turn came.  There never seemed to be enough time in the day to fill in all those pages!  And as above, there were more prizes to find.  Both of David's sisters have their own baby books there, and as the years went by the entries for each child became shorter and fewer.  Of course!  With each child, Mom was busier and busier.  I do remember Alice mentioning the existence of those baby books, but I had never seen them nor did I know where they were until today.  Once again, there was an unexpected surprise.  One more baby book was at the bottom of the pile, clearly older than the first three.  It belonged to David's mother and is therefore almost 100 years old.   

How lucky families are that like David's and mine still have first hand accounts (diaries and letters, fr example, in my case) and photographic records (as both of do) of their ancestors!  These are gems.  I hope the day will come when David and his sisters will have the time to sit down together to look at these items I found today.  Maybe, if they do have such an opportunity, they can record the memories that surface, the stories they were told about some of the people, and the oral history they remember being told.  That would be a truly wonderful thing, wouldn't it?