Tombstone Tuesday - Joseph and Delinda (Plymell) Nichols

It seems a lot of my time on this blog recently has been taken up with the Plymell family and their relations. I'm not exactly sure why that's been happening since the major focus of my research (as well as the impetus for beginning this blog!) has been my Brownings.

However, I'm a firm believer in the idea that you go where these things lead you and lately they've been pointing me towards Plymells. So be it!

The headstone to the left is the stone marking the final resting place of Joseph Nichols and his wife Delinda Jane Plymell. They are my third great-grandparents. This stone is in the New Hebron Cemetery in Honey Creek Twn., Crawford County, Illinois.

Joseph's already been featured on this blog with a post; you can find it here. Delinda has been mentioned a couple of times before as well -- if the Man With The Fiddle from the post below is indeed George Edward Vane, then he would have been Delinda's nephew.

I have spoken a few places about Delinda's as-yet-unproven Indian heritage. According to descendants of her brother James Fuller Plymell, Fuller's children and family members claimed Indian descent from the Wyandot tribe although they refused to make it "official" by going through the government. I heard something slightly different in my family. In mine, it was that Delinda's mother Margaret was half Iroquois. (I have since learned that the Wyandot tribe is of Iroquoian extraction.)

I remember going over to my grandparent's house when I was young -- the house that Joseph Nichols built with his own hands, though I didn't realize it at the time -- and being fascinated by two large oval-framed pictures hanging on the walls. One was of an old man holding a little boy in a dressing gown. I was sufficiently awed at being told that little boy was my grandfather. It paled in comparison, though, to the other person in the other oval frame, Joseph's wife Delinda. My grandfather would say, "That's my great-grandmother Delinda. She was a Plymell. She was also Indian. Iroquois Indian. Can't you see it in her face, Patti?"

I would stare for a long time looking at her. Something about her bearing fascinated me and even slightly scared and intimidated me. With my peaches and cream complexion and red hair, I simply couldn't believe she was related to me. Her coloring was dark; I pictured ramrod straight black hair pulled back into that bun at the nape of her neck. Though she looked very tired she still held her head up so proudly. Her cheekbones were sky high, and her eyes! Deep set and intense. Her eyes, I imagined in my youthful feverish way, were those of a hidden warrior princess imprisioned in the trappings of a gingham dress.

Yes, grandpa, I can see it! I would always say. It was our ritual. And as I write this post, all I have to do is look up over my computer desk and hanging on my wall, still in its same oval frame, is Delinda's picture. Those intense eyes look down on me still. The picture I've posted above and to my right is a smaller version of the photo in the oval frame and without the artist's inkings added to it.

She does look Indian. Doesn't she? Or is it just my still-youthful, feverish imagination?

The Man with The Fiddle

I like this picture. Too bad I don't know for sure who this man is. The picture itself and some background about my family history provides me with some definite clues to his identity and I think I can therefore narrow it down a bit.

I start with looking at the picture itself. The man is holding a fiddle. Someone correct me if it's actually a violin (since I'm no musician) but the way he's holding the bow seems more like a fiddle player would hold it. There's no apparent chin rest on the instrument.

The background is obviously a backdrop; look at the line it makes behind the chair legs. The man's clothing looks homemade. His pants are striped or corded and "bootcut," or narrow to the ankle. The boots are working boots, scuffed and worn. His coat and vest look like wool or some other sort of heavy fabric. He doesn't have a collar sticking out of his shirt, but that necktie! It's polka-dotted! And his hair is oiled and parted to the side. It looks like the tail of an otter got oiled and plopped on top of his head, poor boy. I know he was gussying up for the camera but it still makes me giggle.

He looks about twenty years old, maybe twenty-five at most. Though his tie and his hair seem to date the photo to the late 1860's, I'm thinking I might move that date up to the early 1870's. I say that for two reasons. When you turn the picture over, it says, "D.H. Hill, Arcadia, Kansas." I googled D.H. Hill in the hopes that I could narrow down the date range of the shot that way but came up with nothing. I'd love to find the photographer, but I can still fill in some blanks with my family history.

Around 1872, the Vane family moved to Arcadia, Kansas. John Vane and his wife Adaline Plymell had five children that I know of, but only two of their boys would be old enough to be the subject of this photo. Martin Luther was born c1850 but died prior to 1860 so he can be ruled out immediately. The other two are William Wiley Shannon Vane, who was born c1852, and George Edward Vane, born in 1853. (I featured the other two siblings of this family in a recent post; see Cymantha and William James Vane below.)

Not much is known about William Wiley Shannon, except that he married Augusta King. As for George, he did some traveling, probably for work -- he was in Labette County, Kansas in 1880 as a boarder and he was in Newton County, Missouri as a laborer in 1900. George never married and died of drospy in 1903 in Arcadia in the home of his sister Cymantha Curnutt. He was buried in the Old Arcadia Cemetery on his 40th birthday.

There are a few of the sons of William Wallace Plymell, Adaline Plymell Vane's brother, that would be about the right age and who also moved to Kansas in the early 1870's. I don't know enough about these boys to completely eliminate them. However, the 1875 Kansas state census shows Wallace and his boys (John Catlett, Cordova and Lyman) in Sumner County, Kansas. John C. was age 24, Cordova was age 21, and Lyman was age 19. This picture could be any of these boys if they happened to be in Arcadia when the picture was taken. Lastly, a note written on the back of the picture of Cymantha and William James Vane mentions that the Plymell boys were in Wichita in neighboring Sedgwick County. I've already dated the writing on that picture to the mid to late-1870's era.

Given this information, I lean heavily towards the supposition that the mystery man here is George Edward Vane. Was traveling George a fiddle player? I don't know. But if this picture was taken around 1873, our George would be 20 years old. It fits. What do you think?

Back Up Plans

I was reading some other geneablogs today (thanks to Kay B here) and ran across the following mention to Genea-Bloggers and their Data Backup Day March Madness.

Create a post at your geneablog about either a data loss you experienced with
your research data or what you’ve done to prevent data loss… So, are you
prepared in case your hard drive fails? Or there is a fire or some other natural
disaster? What would you lose if you could not get to your research? And how
long would it take to reconstruct that data from scratch?

Data loss, hm? Yes, I have a story about that and I remember it well.

My best friend gave me a laptop back in 1993. I adored it. I installed a little program called The Master Genealogist (LOVE LOVE LOVE that program!!) on it and began my genealogical work on it. I backed up my data here and there onto floppy drives but for the most part I was unschooled in the frailties of the hardware I depended on. Like many people do with all things mechanical and technical that surround them, I simply expected it to work.

Until one day, about five years into my genealogical research, it just didn't.

Oh, the caterwauling! In a panic I searched for my floppies. It'd been a while since I'd backed up and for the life of me, I could not find them. We'd moved, I'd had my daughter, my life was all topsy-turvy....and they were gone as well. I finally resigned myself to the losses (let's not go into how long that took me or the things I said between the time I lost the data and the time I finally did so) but I decided to keep the dead laptop. I kept it on the off chance that someday, someone would come along who might be able to pull the data off my hard drive, assuming it was still good. I didn't have the money to get it taken in at the time (new kid, one less job, etc.) and every time I'd get enough something would come up....you know how it is.

Finally someone came along. I took it in and heard the worst sort of news. Data gone. Laptop hard drive deader than a doornail. I'd been continuing my research in the intervening years but still mourned the loss of a lot of my original data. I hadn't yet roused myself enough to start again from scratch but I was just about at that point when Fate decided to stop having me for breakfast and just give me a break. We'd packed up to move (again) and in the packing I found my box of floppies! Whooooo hoooo! The restore worked but the latest floppy I found was a backup I'd done about three years before my data went kaput. Better than nothing! All in all I lost those three years of work, but I felt I could rebuild from there and I did so.

Never again, I swore. Never again. It was a hard lesson to learn but it sure was a powerful one. And so far, never again. I back up on my Seagate. I back up on a zip drive and back up on two different flash drives I carry with me. I back up on my regular computer and back up on my other system I am currently building. I have burned CDs in a safe deposit box. The only thing I have yet to do is store my data on the web. That'll happen at some point.

I have yet to scan in every old picture and document I have. I'm in the process of doing so and once I get that done it'll all be backed up again in as many ways as I can do it.

Never again!

(Not At All) Wordless Wednesday -- Clementine Mae (Hamilton) Depperman Bernier

Wordless? Riiiiight. Not happening!

To the left is the wedding announcement of Clementine Mae Hamilton to Robert Bernier. The couple was married in 1948.

Clementine was my grandmother. It is interesting to me that this article listed her as "Miss," implying she'd never been married before her marriage to Robert. In fact, she had. She'd been married to my grandfather, Franklin Depperman, and they'd divorced around 1944. Clementine and Frank had two children before they did so; my mother and her brother.

Clementine went on to have five more children with Robert. These children are my half-aunts and half-uncles though I've never met any of them. Take that back....when I was seven or eight I remember going with my mother to visit Clementine and I believe one or two of her sons were there at the time. I could be mistaken about that memory because as I said, I was very young. My mom had seen Clementine briefly as a child from time to time but that visit was the first time she and my mom had actually met face to face as two adults. I wish I'd been old enough to pay more attention to that meeting instead of occupying myself playing in the front room of Clementine's house.

Clementine wrote my mother for a while but eventually the letters stopped coming. Years later, in the late 1990's, I located her again and we corresponded a bit. The letters to me stopped coming eventually as well. I did not even find out she'd died in 2002 until last year.

I suppose this sounds sad, and in a way it is. I never got to really know my grandmother. My grandfather remarried and the woman he married -- Pearl -- she was my "grandmother" for all intents and purposes though she was as aloof in her way as my grandfather was in his.

In another way, it isn't sad at all. Though my grandmother by blood, Clementine never "felt" like my grandmother in spirit. She seemed warm and loving but she was always very apologetic and I think she always felt the need to apologize and/or explain her actions. She didn't really need to. To my mother, of course, but not to me. Knowing my mother's family like I do I completely understand how Clementine, a shy 20-year old girl, would have felt going up against the proverbial irresistible force in the person of my great-grandmother, Franklin's mother. Many older and wiser people were powerless against her and Clementine just didn't know how to wage that kind of war. She didn't belong in that family anyway. That family would eat kids like her for dinner. I'm glad she got out when she did.

Still, Clementine's people are my people. I share blood with her sons and her daughters. I'd like to find them someday and begin a dialogue.

Tombstone Tuesday - Sweet Sweet Jane (b. & d. 1859) and Olive (1834 -1858)

Today's stone is actually two. One (the small stone leaning over on the left of this picture) is a small, partially buried stone in the New Hebron Cemetery in Crawford County, Illinois. It is the final resting place of Jane, the first of the three girls born to Joseph Nichols and Delinda Jane Plymell.

Jane was born on 4 May 1859 and died a week later on 11 May 1859. Her stone is covered with the grime of age and it leans backward, as if it is tired. It feels like such a sad little stone to me.

It's not as sad as the stone that rests to Jane's right, though. Jane's aunt Olive Ann Plymell is buried there. Olive's stone sunk into the ground a long time ago and then the top part cracked and snapped off in the center. When I was there last August I managed to dig half of it up but the other half has sunken so deep that it would take more effort and tools than I had available to me at the time.

Luckily Burl Rich in Crawford County had transcribed this cemetery in 2002, seemingly prior to the damage that Olive's stone has undergone. According to this site, it says:

Plymell, Olive Ann
Dau. of J&M
died February 3, 1858
aged 23Y 6M 22D

That puts Olive born about 1834. Olive was Delinda Jane's sister and both were daughters of James Plymell and his wife Margaret. We don't know Margaret's last name or if she even had one -- I'd always been told that Margaret's father was Iroquois. Other Plymell researchers are looking into it but as it stands now, my family's lore appears fairly accurate. Other Plymell branches from James and Margaret have more direct avenues of information and say that she was actually half Wyandot. You can read more about the origins of the Wyandot people at Wikipedia, but basically they were of Iroquoian extraction, a blend of the Huron Confederacy peoples and their Petun (Tobacco People) neighbors. It's a very interesting read!

The James and Margaret Plymell family originally lived in Delaware County, Ohio, and then moved onward into Marion County. Delinda Jane was born in Delaware County in 1822. James and Margaret were buried in Marion County, Ohio. Soon thereafter their children came to Crawford County.

Sweet, sweet Jane. And Olive too.

The Genealogy Junkie True Confessions

Randy Seaver from Genea-Musings (see sidebar) has a Saturday Night Funtime tradition and his latest one was the following:

The Assignment: Answer These Questions about Your Genealogy Life

As usual, I feel like Rabbit from Winnie The Pooh. Wasn't he always rushing about yelling "I'm late! I'm late?" Well, I am. Aaaagain. So here are my answers!

1. When did you start genealogy research?

1992, when I was pregnant with my daughter. Lots of time on my hands then!

2. Why did you start doing research?

My grandmother was my inspiration. After my grandfather died, my then 90-year old grandmother decided to remain alone in their home. I lived in the same town as she did but my parents lived about an hour away so they made it clear to me it was my responsibility to check on her daily. At the age of 22 that wasn't exactly the most exciting assignment, let me tell you! We'd never grown close -- the age difference between my grandparents and I was even greater than most and seemingly insurmountable then. I thought, if I got up early and went for breakfast, I could visit shorter amounts of time and my excuses for leaving would be better ones! So that's what I did.

But life has a funny way of turning out in ways you don't expect. I went for breakfasts. Grandma would make me coffee, eggs and oatmeal and we'd talk. At first they were rather stilted conversations because at 22 everything was about me. I suspect grandma pulled out her old boxes full of pictures because of the lapses in conversation, or maybe it was because when she'd tell me things like her mother was a Quaker or that her father was a tintyper, I showed a little bit of interest.

The clincher was when she handed me a paper written by my grandfather. On it were tombstone transcriptions of my Browning relatives from a cemetery in Crawford County. She told me that grandpa had always wondered who these people were. It wasn't long before I began to wonder as well.

3. What was your first big success in research?

Discovering who the "S & M Browning" written on my Browning tombstones were.

4. What is your biggest genealogy regret?

Up until recently, that I'm not able to sit down with my grandfather and tell him all the things that I've discovered about his family. He was interested in genealogy and researched his own roots, things I never knew about him when he was alive. Though he and I were close we never really talked because I was young and too wrapped up in my own little world to pay attention. I'd pay attention now.

I suspect that my biggest genealogical regret will be coming soon, if it isn't already here unbeknownst to me. A researcher and cousin I've worked with and have developed a friendship with has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her deepest regret is not being able to prove that the John Browning found living in Harrison County in 1820 (though Ancestry doesn't show him or Samuel it's a database error -- I have the original) is our Samuel Browning's father. I would LOVE to prove this before she goes. I'm making a trip back to OH in April and I am hoping to find something then but I fear April may be too late. I haven't heard from her in a month or two. It could already be too late.

5. What are you best known for in the genealogy world?

I wrote a book on my Browning family that I self-published on CD for family members and other interested parties. It took eight years of research and much more in sweat equity. Worth every penny.

6. What is your professional status in genealogy?

Intermediate-skill family historian and researcher. I have no professional credentials whatsoever, though I've done a few paying gigs for clients.

7. What is your biggest genealogy achievement?

See #5 above, I'd think. That, or reuniting two long-lost family members after more than 60 years apart. I've been told by one of the ladies' nephews that I should consider that my greatest achievement. He says there is no way to measure the enrichment of their lives in their golden years because of this. I'm thrilled and humbled that my actions have meant so much.

8. What is the most FUN you've had doing genealogy?

Other than the happy dances of new research or informational victory? Meeting cousins and introducing them to each other, going on trips and feeling instant camraderie, and of late, beginning a blog! It's a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

9. What is your favorite genealogy how-to book?

Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photographs, followed closely by Ohio Genealogical Records.

10. What notable genealogist would you like to meet someday?

Elizabeth Shown Mills

World War I Letters -- Arthur B. Creswell

As I mentioned in a post early last week (see March 2) I've taken the time to read through the letters my grandmother Beulah received from servicemen in World War I. I was surprised to find that instead of writing to one serviceman, my grandmother had written to two! So, first things first -- in this installment, we explore the first set of letters.

The first set, consisting of three letters, was written by a man named Arthur B. Creswell, a Private in Battery F, 311th Field Artillery of the American Expeditionary Forces. The first is dated 29 Jan 1919 and was sent from Benoite Vaux, France. The second is postdated 31 Mar 1919 and was sent from Pont sur Meuse, France. The third is dated 10 May 1919 and was sent from the port of St. Nazaire, France. He says he is stationed at a camp that looks like it is spelled Camp Guehrie? (If anyone can help me with the name of the camp that'd be great. I've tried to locate a camp with similar name online with no luck so far.)

Arthur was the friend of my grandmother's brother that I mentioned in a previous post. He and my great-uncle Raymond Orlond Garrard (Grandma's brother) were in the same unit and the two of them were two of what came to be known as "Doughboys." The letter of 29 Jan 1919 mentions that the unit had been heading up to Germany with a convoy of horses and mules and that my great-uncle Raymond got sick in Luxembourg and had to go to the hospital. Arthur says that it was his understanding that Raymond had been transferred to another outfit. The next letter (31 March 1919) mentions that Raymond had rejoined the 311th a few days prior. Arthur also says that a week before they'd moved to Pont sur Meuse and are near a city named Comeroy and that in the next week they would be moving back to the place they'd been in January (though he is not more specific about this.) In the last letter (10 May 1919) Arthur says he expects to be called back to the USA any day now and that of all the time he'd spent in France, St. Nazaire was the most beautiful place he'd seen.

Enclosed in the last letter (the one dated in May) was a photo negative. I scanned it and did a negative reversal on it and ended up with the picture you see on the right. The man to the left in the picture is my great-uncle Raymond. I'm not sure, but since the negative was tucked into the envelope, perhaps the man standing next to Raymond is Arthur? Perhaps this picture was taken of the two before they headed off to France in the war. Then again, it might have been taken in France before they headed home. I'll never know.

I discovered a wonderful short book written about the 311th by William Elmer Bachman called "The Delta of the Triple Elevens." You can download it for free here. Bachman says that the 311th left France on 14 May 1919 (Arthur had been right in his guess after all!) on the USS Edward Luckenbach and finally sighted land in the harbor in New York on 27 May at 5 pm in the evening.

There had to be no sweeter sight in the world to those homesick boys than the Statue!

Arthur's draft registration papers are on Ancestry.com. He signed them on 17 Jun 1917. He describes himself as an oil well driller, age 28, tall, with a medium build and black hair and black eyes. Black eyes? He must mean brown, surely?

Anyway, Arthur was born in Palestine, Crawford County, Illinois, on 4 Sept 1888. He was the son of James Wilson (Wilson J.) Creswell and his wife Rilla B., maiden name unknown at this time. After the war Arthur went back home to Crawford County and by the 1920 census he is found living in LaMotte Township, married to a girl named Annie. He sure didn't waste any time, did he? The couple have no children at that time but by 1930 Arthur and Annie have moved to Honey Creek Township and have a 4 year old son named Harold.

I went to the social security death index and found that Arthur had received his last social security benefits in Eddy County, NM. I looked in Find-A-Grave and found both he and his wife Millie Anna buried in the Twin Oaks Memorial Park in Artesia in Eddy County. Annie was born in 1893 and died 31 Jan 1964. Arthur died on 29 May 1970. I've included the pictures of their tombstones and I thank Delma Ingram at Find-A-Grave for posting them. Arthur's is a World War I memorial grave and I like knowing that I have what is written on his tombstone, written in his own hand.

(By the way, Find-A-Grave is a great resource and a fabulous service and I've made it a point to volunteer my time for them before. I need to make an effort to post all my relatives' stones there and I encourage everyone else to do so as well! If Delma hadn't done what she did I might still be wondering where Arthur rested.)

I still don't know Millie Anna's maiden name since I haven't had much luck finding it in the IL State Marriage Index database on the ISA website. I also wonder if Arthur and Annie's son Harold had any children. Now that I know that Arthur and Annie went to New Mexico, I also wonder, when did they move there? Did Harold go with them or was he old enough to have stayed in the Crawford County area? Always questions.

I'd sure like Arthur's letters to go home.

The next installment will be about the second set of letters my grandmother received from a serviceman. This set has presented much more of a challenge to me. My grandmother didn't know this boy.

UPDATE (9 Mar 2009): I have located Harold, Arthur's son. I will be sending his father's letters to him sometime this week. I hope he enjoys them!

(Not At All) Wordless Wednesday -- The Vane Children (c1869)

Wordless Wednesday again! Wordless? Riiiiiiight. Not happening!

The picture to the right is of Cemantha Jane Vane and her younger brother William James, called "Chimie" on the photo (which I believe is a phonetic rendering of the nickname 'Jimmy.') These two are the children of John Vane and Adaline Plymell. John and Adaline were married on 2 Nov 1848 in Crawford County, Illinois, and moved to Arcadia, Crawford Co., KS around 1872. The couple had five known children -- Martin Luther, William Shannon, George Edward, Cemantha Jane, and William James. John died in Arcadia in 1889 and Adaline followed shortly thereafter in 1890.

Adaline Plymell is my 3rd great aunt. Her sister Delinda Jane, who married Joseph Nichols, was my 3rd-g-grandmother.

This photo was taken in Decatur in Macon Co., Illinois. Originally I believed the time frame to be around 1865 because the style of photo (card stock, double bordered) looked familiar to me from others I also have. Sure enough, I have a set of pictures that look exactly like this from my Nichols family -- John Nichols, his wife Delinda Jane (mentioned above), and their daughters Eliza Ursula and Missouri Ann. That set of pictures is dated c1865 according to the writing on the back, which is in Ursula's hand.

There are two sets of handwriting on the back of this photo, however (see the back of the photo below.) One set -- listing the children's names -- is Ursula's. The other set is unknown but I think dates to a slightly later period since the "lives in Arcadia" notation could only have been mentioned after the Vanes moved on to Kansas in 1872.

Cemantha Vane looks about 8-10 years old in this photo so I'm guessing this photo is closer to 1869. I'm saying this because the little boy in the dressing gown in the photo is William James Vane and he wasn't born until late 1868/early 1869.

The back has a listing of a few Curnutts (Cemantha's children I presume, though to my admittedly limited knowledge I only show Oscar as her definite child.) Also listed are Cordova, Charley and Will Plymell. These three are nephews of Adaline and Delinda, sons of their brother Wallace William Plymell.

One of the most interesting things about this photo to me was the photographer. E. A. (Edward A.) Barnwell had a studio called the People's Ambrotype Gallery at 24 North Water Street in Decatur, Illinois. According to this site, it so happened that in May of 1860 Decatur was the location of Abraham Lincoln's endorsement for President at the Republican state convention. Lincoln got his picture taken after his speech on 9 May 1860 and E.A. Barnwell was the photographer!

I'm not sure when E.A. stopped taking photographs and sold his studio to W.C. Pitner, but the above link implies that he sold out around 1863 and moved to Cerro Gordo, IL, just a few miles east of Decatur. Perhaps Pitner continued to use Barnwell's name on the studio -- I'm not sure. Hopefully I can find out.

Tombstone Tuesday - William Finley Eagleton (1862-1902)

For Tombstone Tuesday I thought I'd contribute the following picture and story about my great-great-uncle William Finley Eagleton.

(Thanks for taking the picture and putting it on Find-A-Grave, B.J.!)

William Finley was my grandma Beulah's uncle, her mother Louisa Adaline Eagleton's brother. He moved off to Colorado at an early age and the family never knew what became of him.

It wasn't until a while later that I unearthed a relative of Finley's -- one of his daughter's descendants. She was able to tell me what had happened and provided me with the article that I have included here. You can click on it and read it for the details. It is certainly a sad story but at the same time it is interesting to read how much reporting has changed in the last century. They didn't have any problems reporting about possible suicides nor did they refuse to reveal names to protect the identities of the innocent.

Fin's accident was just that -- an accident. I hope it was quick.

When I found out what had happened to him I told my grandmother. She said she wished that she could be given the chance to explain to her mother where her brother had gone to. He just disappeared and they never did hear from him again.

He certainly hadn't meant it that way.

William Finley Eagleton was born 2 Feb 1862 in Crawford County, Illinois, the son of Pvt. David Newton Eagleton and Margaret Jane Conrad. He married Eva Margaret Goddard on 30 April 1897 in Jamestown, Boulder Co., CO. He died of an accidental gunshot wound on 6 Jan 1902.

My Grandma and Her Letters from World War I

When my grandmother Beulah passed away in 2002 she entrusted me with all the errata of her life. She was born in 1900 so that was a lot of errata! She'd been the one chosen to ferret away all the treasures from her parent's families as well as her husband's because she'd been the only one to care. I spent many days with her sitting in her chair and me on the floor at her feet going through her belongings -- old pictures, letters, bibles -- and asking her who they belonged to. We would laugh and share stories and old memories. Grandma was a tiny woman, barely 4'11", but she had such a big presence! Other than my daughter she's the one person in my life that has meant the most to me. I miss her so fiercely I can still be brought to tears but I blink them back because I know she'd just admonish me in her soft voice. "Now, Patti," she'd say, "it's the way of things. I wanted to go. It was my time."

The generations in her family were long ones. Though I am only in my early 40's, my great-grandparents (my grandma's parents, that is) were born in the 1850s and 1860s. My grandma was 40 when she had my dad and her mother was 40 when she was born. She told me that when she was born in 1900 on a cold December day in Illinois, her dad put her in a shoebox in the bottom drawer of a bureau and moved it closer to the fire so the reflection of the heat would keep her warm. She said that he could hold her in the palm of his hand -- she was only about 2 1/2 lbs when she was born -- and they honestly didn't think she'd even live. She lived, all right! She lived until she was 101, long enough to see my daughter born and even better, long enough so that my daughter will be able to always remember her "great-nahnee."

I have many, if not most, of her things. She bestowed them upon me before her last stroke, the one that sent her permanently into the nursing home from her place in my parent's home. Now that she's gone, I'm the only one who cares. I have the cedar chest she got from my grandfather upon their wedding in 1934. In it rests McGuffey's Readers and old dolls and family bibles and letters and a hair book from the 1860's. I have a metal Coca-Cola cooler she had from the 40s or 50s that now houses many more old photographs. I have two heavy metal fishing tackle boxes that house deeds and letters and metal social security cards and old coins and....well, you get the picture.

The treasures in these boxes are so many that the lists above don't do them justice. They'll be fodder for many a future post, that's for sure! What made me begin this tale, however, was the letters my grandmother kept of her correspondence with a boy serving in the same outfit as her brother did during World War I. I've been thinking for some time now that I'd like to pull them out and transcribe them and then post them here now that it's almost assured that both writer and receiver are gone. After that I'd like to return them to his family members. What if he died later on in the War? What if the letters I own are the only written record of someone precious to someone else and I'm only holding onto them because my grandma did? No, I think they rightly belong in someone else's hands.

I think I'll find them tonight when I return home and see what I can do. Stay tuned!