52 Ancestors Week 41 of 2022: Passed Down

I'm back.  My arm is still broken but at least I am testing negative for COVID so there's that.  Fall is beginning to set in here after a prolonged, dry summer that I guess I should not forget actually didn't begin until the second week of July after one of the wettest springs on record.  The sling would have been easier to manage if I were still wearing summer clothes but that's life.  And so, to the topic.

Very little in the way of oral history was passed on to me.  My mother was about as chatty as your average oyster about family stories, and my father didn't like talking about his either (for different reasons, I am pretty sure that there was a lot of unhappiness in his home of origin).  My husband's mother was very willing to talk about her family, but she was hindered by the early death of her mother from being able to tell us much about that side, and I don't know if she knew much about her father's family.  What she knew, she shared, though I guess that did not extend to labeling all of the many, many photographs that came to us eventually.  Of objects, I have only a green bud vase that I think had belonged to one of her grandmothers.  I could have kept the spare set of dentures that we found after she passed away but that seemed a little morbid.

My family moved a lot which means that not that many objects got passed to me from more distant ancestors, but I do have some things that my parents owned when I was a child, including a pair of pictures of sailing ships on glass that have miraculously survived not only all of the moves my parents made, but several that I made, including crossing the United States.  I have my mother's Golden Touch & Sew Singer sewing machine, dating from 1965 (and still functional!). I have a few souvenirs of our time overseas, and I have some letters and papers that belonged to my maternal grandmother and her family.  All of these things got passed down to me, and I expect I will try to pass them down to my children as well (probably not the sewing machine).  One of my daughters is very interested in our family history so there is some hope of preservation. 

These went up on the walls of all the homes we lived in long enough to unpack.