Adding Context to a Family Keepsake

Now that I've decided to reproduce my aunt's home economics notebook, I am looking for ways to make the book more interesting and uncover any other stories related to this little keepsake. My approach isn't strictly genealogical; it's more a blend of local and family history with a dose of literary criticism from my high school English Lit teacher past.

My purpose is to add a "sense of place" to the notebook, not to overwhelm it with facts, figures, or history. I will probably need to select the most compelling information and save the other research for background. Here's my initial brainstorm list of possibilities; feel free to leave a comment if you can add to the list.

I used MindNode for Mac (free) to brainstorm possible topics:

I like using a mapping tool for brainstorming, but here it is in list format:

Franny's Food Notebook

Food Notebook

• Part 1 Requirements
• kitchen how-tos
• 50's homemaking
• food trends
• Part 2 Personalized
• recipes
• clippings
• comments

Author: Frances Brown

• age 13
• family
• parents Frank & Arline father working?
• 1 sister Susie
• home address frequent moves
• friends

Willard School

• junior high
• santa ana, ca
• new school bldg 1931
• home economics class semester or yr long?
• teacher?
• what was it like? girls only?

1944

• home ec
• wartime
• orange county

With so many possibilities to make the story richer, it will be tough to choose the best. What have I missed?

Lessons from the Archive: Finding Clues to Tell a Story

Sometimes you have to do a bit of snooping on the way to sleuthing.

By snooping, I mean that you just have to open your eyes to look at anything that comes along. Sleuthing seems to have a more defined goal and method, but snooping can pay off bigtime.

My Sweet Aunt Frances saved a lot of stuff. The fact that her home contained only one tiny trashcan under the kitchen sink and an even smaller one in the bathroom are evidence that she didn't throw away much. She collected twisty-ties, rubber bands, and sugar packets, and crafted scratch paper from junk mail. Drawers were stuffed with old letters and cards, shirt boxes became repositories.

Obviously, she was a saver. For the family historian and genealogist, that's all good news. People with the Saving Gene save most everything. If they saved paper clips, they probably saved photographs. If you need to tend to a Saver's home, you might be in the enviable position of curating a superabundance of stuff.

My solution was to box it up, bring it home, and unwrap each box another time. So, when I have an extra few hours or especially miss Auntie I open a box and snoop around. I don't do any serious preservation of artifacts, scanning, or archiving, that comes next. For now, I just read old letters, look at picture, and leaf through books and journals.

It might seem easy to separate the treasures from the trash, but it's not. Soon you come across the wedding guest book and wonder what to do with it. You get tired, and the old calendars and datebooks seem less important. The family photos are set aside to save, but what about the vacation albums and loose slides? Trash or treasure?

A few weeks ago I came across Auntie's home economics notebook. It looked familiar because I was required to compile almost the same book when I was in high school home economics. Nothing changed very much. It was a school assignment, overall insignificant, but I set it aside and later decided it might be a fun project to create a reproduction copy. With budget cuts in California schools, home economics is becoming a dim memory. As I scanned the pages, I decided it would be even more interesting if I could add some kind of context to the book.

Frances Louise Brown was 13 years old when she assembled the book. Her careful and beautiful penmanship testifies to a careful and good student. She carefully recorded the due dates for the book, noting extra credit points available for turning it in early. She included a Table of Contents and "My Half of Notebook" filled with recipes and clippings of foods, dishes, and products. I would say she was a bit of an overachiever!

I learned all this from the notebook. To know more about teenage Franny, I had to go into my grandmother's photos and letters. Snooping led to sleuthing and now I am putting together the clues that tell the story of Franny's Foods Notebook.

I'll be back with Part 2, and more photos to share.

P.S. My inspiration for this project was planted by Denise Olson's eBook The Future of Memories. You are missing a treat, if you haven't read it yet.

Before the Archive: Trash or Treasure (continued)

A few people have asked me to share how I am working through the boxes from my aunt’s estate. I wish I had a magic wand to make the entire project easier and less daunting, but each unique situation seems to call for reworking and refining the process. What is working for me with this estate may not work for you, but I hope it will give you some ideas and encouragement for your own inherited archive.

This is what happens when you have to clear out a relative's home quickly.
The Stuff moves home with you. Here's Uncle Benny's pastor's desk and
Auntie's sewing box with the boxes brought home from her house.

The MOST IMPORTANT lesson I've learned is to ask youself, What is my main goal?

I tend to get easily distracted, and probably need to print the answer in large type and put in front of me on the work table. I forget that my goal is NOT to:

• Open a vintage sewing notions shop on Etsy
• Become an antique vendor at the local swap meet
• Become a five-star eBay seller
• Display a china teacup collection or Southwest art in my home.

Instead, I have to remember to focus on a workable goal for me, today.

My Archive Goal

• Collect and preserve MY family history — photos, letters, and documents from previous generations

• Collect and preserve OTHER family history — items from other families that could be returned

• Collect and preserve LOCAL history — photos, items, ephemera that tell the story of the community and could be donated to the local historical society

Staying focused on the goal is my greatest challenge in working with an estate.

When I inherited my grandmother’s trunk, the contents had already been sifted so many times that everything left had value to our family history. With my aunt’s estate, the opposite is true. Auntie carefully preserved everything, from her grade school report cards to the first rose presented by her future husband. What to save? What to toss? My aunt and uncle had no children, but it seems callous to just throw away these things that were once so important to someone I loved. So, I stop and read a few notes (who, what, when, why) and something shifts in my understanding of that young girl in 1954. Maybe all these little collections and scrapbooks and tidbits were never intended so much to be immortalized and saved, as they were her own way of trying to make sense of her feelings and the events in her life. It’s certainly a time-travel snapshot of her life. If I were writing a biography of my aunt’s life or even a novel, these boxes would be a research dream come true. But, I’m not (at least, I don’t think I am, today).

This past weekend I spent several hours working through boxes. You can see from the Before photo that I have several boxes overflowing with papers and things.

My basic method was to go through the contents of each box at a large worktable to gauge the overall scope of the collection.

Collection Overview

• 12 High school and college yearbooks

• Packet of school report cards, grades 3-12

• Packet of letters from young man in Texas

• Loose letters and cards from family and friends all over the world

• Church records, visiting books, tracts, etc.

• School district employee directories 1975-1991

• 1 box of congratulation cards and mementoes from high school graduation

• 1 box of congratulation cards and mementoes from college graduation

• 1 large stationery box vintage shower cards

• 1 large vintage candy box with cards and dried flowers

• 3 photo albums• 2 notebook diaries from my uncle before and after his heart surgery

• 1 large box loose vacation photos, mostly scenery; film developing envelopes

• Wall calendars from 1958 to present, each date filled in diary-style

• Pocket calendars from 1975 to present

• Household files

• Employment contracts, paystubs, manuals

• Two address books

• 15 Bibles with personal notes on end papers and margins

• Large box of craft and quilting patterns

• Scattered vintage office supplies

• Vintage blank greeting cards

Now that I have an idea of the kind of material my aunt saved, I am working out an overall plan:

Next Steps

My goal is to collect and preserve family history and local history material, however, I really do like a lot of the vintage ephemera Auntie saved over the years, so I am giving myself permission to save some of the best for my own craft projects!

1. Contact local historical society about donating high school memorabilia, church records, school district directories.

2. Contact college about donating yearbooks and other mementos. Alternate: donate yearbooks to e-yearbooks.com for scanning.

3. Sort vacation photos; save a few with people; discard scenery.

4. Donate craft patterns to thrift shop.

5. Save best vintage cards for my projects.

6. Go through high school, college boxes; save diplomas to scan.

7. Collect vitals; birth, marriage, certificates, obits from newspapers, old funeral programs.

8. Save packet of letters from Texas boy; possible return to family?

9. Remove best photos from magnetic album

10. Save address books

11. Bibles?

Throw Away/Give Away

Misc. Correspondance

Magnetic photo album (scan pages, remove best photos)

Old calendars

Old greeting cards

Vintage office supplies

Old home insurance policies

Property purchase and sale records (keep Bill of Sale with address)

Employee records (keep salary record)

Teacher cards from students

At the end of the day I had filled two large Recycle Bins with paper trash, and was left with six boxes --

After

Vitals and Family History - keep

Photos - keep

Vintage - keep for projects

High School, Church History (Bibles) and Local History - donate?

College - donate?

Orphan Letters - research and return

Working through my aunt's things has been much more difficult than I expected. She was a very private person, and I think that many of the things she preserved were truly for "her eyes only." I also know that she would never want to create a burden for her family. I'm comfortable sharing the more public memorabilia she collected by donating it to the historical society or preserving it in my own Family Archive, but other things I've decided to respectfully destroy in honor of her privacy.

Some people may disagree with this arrangement; they might argue that anything and everything is public property after someone dies. I suppose it's a good lesson to all of us about the things we choose to keep or discard. One never knows who might read those letters or diaries or where they might finally come to rest.

Celebrating Auntie

Frances Brown Turner

1931 - 2011

My dear aunt, FRANCES BROWN TURNER, an elementary school teacher whose patience and kindness continued to inspire her family and friends long after her retirement from the classroom, passed away gently August 30, 2011 of respiratory failure in Santa Ana, California with her family at her side. She was 80 years old.

Frances was born in Olathe, Kansas to Frank and Arline Brown, and moved with her family to Orange County, California when she was five years old. She was the first person in her family to attend college and graduated from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University) in 1958. She taught second and third grade in Garden Grove for many years.

She married Benny C. Turner, pastor of Santa Ana Bible Church, and worked with him to build the congregation until his death in 1973.

In 1983, Frances married Hal Jones and enjoyed traveling and visiting family in Southern California. She was an accomplished quilter and seamstress who presented each new family member with a very special baby quilt.

Frances was hospitalized on August 28, 2011 and died two days later; she was devoted to her younger sister, Suzanne, who passed away on August 28, 2010.

Frances was preceded in death by her former husband Benny Turner and her sister Suzanne Freeman. She is survived by her husband Hal Jones, and by her nieces and nephew and their families, Deanna and Kip Craig, and Denise and Dan Levenick, Barbara and Richard Schnittker, Paul and Gwen Smith, and Sidonie Smith and Greg Grieco.

Memories

Ride 'em Cowgirls

Family Home Tour Update, in Which Together We Enjoy a "Happy Crappy Day"

Dating a Photo of Princess Usha at the Brown Girls' Party