I am at a bit of a loss for words. I have an old tin sewing box from maybe the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, my guess. I had it out from under the dresser tonight while looking for a camera battery and charger I have lost that go to my old Nikon. While I was rooting around for it, my daughter came along and looked through some old pictures in a cardboard box, then wanted to know about the sewing box. It had been quite a while since I last peered into it at all, so I mostly forgot what was in it, apart from knowing it was to do with family history.
We started in at the top and found it to be letters and such from the Twentieth Century. By the time we got to the bottom, we had found a bank book dated in 1893. I have always thought it was something special to have my grandfather’s grandfather and grandmother’s schoolbooks, but this box had their report cards going back to their earliest years in school. I was also shocked to find a letter from one of the family that was dated on VE Day, and written from Tripoli, Libia. The writer was complaining about having recently spent five days in the hospital with diarrhea. Amazing to wonder if he fought Rommel. I’ll have to look in more detail as we were going through a lot and trying to get to the bottom of the box in one evening to get an overview of what we had. Lots of letter from the war, a suitability card from the time of WWI, and property deeds and wills going all the way through the century.
It really was a treasure. As it was from the family in West Virginia, there is a certain grace to these people in how they wrote and how they addressed one another. I’ll have to go through again and see what I can learn in depth about them, and how they were all related to each other. I appear to have gotten my first name from that family, and while I am not blood related to them, I was able to see my name gone back six generations. Four of those generations including me have it. One of my daughters does, too. So that’s something special.
One other thing that is special is that while we were looking at all these papers, and names were brought back to life going to my grandfather’s grandparents, I have met three out of four of them myself in my early life. One even survived till I was around twenty. Given they were born in the 19-aughts, I have had the privilege of knowing people who were, as it turns out, fit for duty for World War One.