Working on jigsaw puzzles is one of my earliest memories. It was a fun and competitive family past time, something that I still enjoy immensely. Other childhood memories are of my mother and grandmother and aunts talking about family members that I had never met. I was interested in these unseen people, since I didn't even have all of my grandparents, as my father's mother and my mother's father had died long before I was even born. At least I did have some aunts and uncles and cousins that we spent time with and I got to know, but there were many more that for various reasons, I didn't get to know. As a child though, you don't spend much time worrying about such things. They become more important when you have children of your own, but you’re busy, and you know you will remember things that you hear about. Time passes, and you do ask questions and write some of it down, but all too soon your sources of information are gone, and your memory isn’t that far behind.
My mother saved a lot of boxes of my grandmother’s things, diaries, newspapers, letters, etc. My mother also saved a lot of her own things, diaries, newspapers, letters, maps, programs, etc. When my dad passed away, and Mom was no longer able to stay in her home, good daughter that I am, several cross country trips later, I saved my mother’s and grandmother’s things.
One of the first things that I looked for and tried to preserve was the poetry that my grandmother wrote. That was easier said than done. While trying to locate her poetry in all the boxes, I kept finding all these amazing family things that I didn’t know anything about. One of the first things I found was a box of family photos that belonged to my grandmother. Thankfully, most of them had names and sometimes dates written on the back! But for the most part, I didn’t know who these people were. I vaguely remembered hearing some of the names, but they had very little meaning to me. Were they family or neighbors, where did they fit in?