Janet, Nora, and Mother in Underground Atlanta, 1989
When our parents died sixty days apart in 1995, my siblings
and I were in the middle of our working years and careers [actually both of my
brothers are still working, but you know]. My brothers and sister had children
to raise --- as there were eight grand-children under the age of twelve.
Closing their house in the spring of 1996, we carted away boxes and boxes of photos and memorabilia that ended up being stored at my sister Margaret's house.
Closing their house in the spring of 1996, we carted away boxes and boxes of photos and memorabilia that ended up being stored at my sister Margaret's house.
Busy teaching high school English, I didn’t make time in the
summers for going through papers accumulated by my parents in their almost
forty-six years of marriage. A huge project to undertake, my sister and I just
kept finding other things to do.
Packing away pictures in photo boxes, we stored
the thousands of photos in her upstairs closet, and we filed and dumped
haphazardly memorabilia and other paraphernalia in a five-drawer filing cabinet.
Included with my parents’ papers past were those of my mother’s three unmarried
sisters, one of whom spent her retirement years in research and family history.
The amount of paper and photos collected by our family seemed overwhelming.
My Aunt Harriett wrote twenty or thirty books on her family’s
genealogy and on Appomattox County, Virginia, her birthplace. Some of the material
that she gathered and bound into periodicals is quite dry with titles like “The
Tax Records of Appomattox County 1856-1890” or the “Attendance at Sunday School
for Salem Methodist Church, 1948.” Not. That. Riveting. To her, a preserver of the past, the
information mattered.
Mother and Aunt Harriett [in her office] Falls Church, Virginia, 1987
Aunt Harriett, 1986
Her tireless work in family genealogy and history in a time
before common use of the internet and computers is quite impressive. Her
research on her extended family includes a book titled “A Hundred Hunter
Cousins” and “Grandpa Chilton’s Diary,” all meticulously documented and full of
lists and dates and places and people.
About ten years ago, my sister and I began to work through
the photographs by sorting them by decades. We also bought hard backed over-sized
scrapbooks in anticipation of putting together information for the next
generation. We embossed the scrapbooks
with “Chilton” for my mother’s family and “McDaniel” for my dad’s. Left empty
on a shelf for this past decade, we had good intentions but never quite got
around “to it.”
In the last two years, with both of us retired, Margaret and
I started plugging away at this family history of photos and paper – and of
course, the technology now available is invaluable. Few people do hands-on scrapbooks anymore
since we embrace so much digitally.
Too bad.
We already had the scrapbooks, and [stomps foot], we’re
using them.
We’re not all old school, however.
Kenneth, Amy, Mother, Margaret, and Daddy, Mother's Day, 1985
Margaret spent months scanning photos and negatives, birth
certificates, diplomas, grade reports, tax receipts, World War II souvenirs
[odd word] and other interesting [well, anything we found interesting, that is]
papers into her computer. Then we began to take some of the print photos,
papers, and placed them in the scrapbooks immortalizing three generations of my
mother’s family.
In the last two days, we tackled the file folders crammed
into that old five drawer filing cabinet that sits in my sister’s bonus room. Labeled
with each relative’s name, we unloaded them and set out to organize, save, and
toss the detritus gathered there.
We came across part of my mother’s journal. Eh. Not exactly
a journal. It’s notes my mother made….
Though they are loosely
dated, her notes are not in journal form as in a leather bound book, lined with porous paper, and inked full of
her thoughts and interesting tidbits about what adorable children we were. What we
found and read were pieces of paper dated from around 1979 to 1993. In three
recycled, blue file folders, she scribbled information about telephone calls
between her and two of her life long friends, Dot and Sarah. Within those
jottings lies little information about her, but then what she did write told much about her caring nature.
In her famous, illegible handwriting, mother recorded explicit
details about her friends’ lives – their children, their husbands, and their
woes and worries. Extensive notes they are, so that the next time they talked
on the telephone, she could review the notes and ask questions specifically.
Mother's notes, 1983
In a type of shorthand known to her, she used initials for
us when she did make a note: as in “H & D said only goldfish” or “K & S new car” or “Hunter’s award” or “M’s garden.” In March of 1988, she devoted a page to my nephew Paul, who as a newborn, spent time in the neo-natal
ICU. In her manic shorthand, she recorded details about his condition. She also
made proud notes about her other grandchildren as well: “A eats well” and “C’s
precocious.”
Paul, 1988
Writing mainly with a dull pencil, she scribbled on the back of dot-matrix computer paper, old
green and white computer sheets with the names of patients she treated in the
Cardiac Clinic at Grady, on small slips of note pads with different company
logos, on the back and front of sheets of lined notebook paper, and
occasionally on the back of Xerox copies of handouts from my father’s days as
Reading Coordinator for a local school system. Her copious notes also included
particulars about the failing health of her sisters – as she worried about each
of them as they aged.
From the notes that I read, now faded with time, her focus lay with her family
and friends. How sweet it was to read how she kept meticulous notes on their
health and needs. Occasionally she would write, “did not tell about H’s angina”
or “forgot to mention M’s scare” or “[my] fender bender.”
My mother loved her family and friends, and as I scanned her
notes, the memory of how much she did came flooding back.
Now there's a legacy.
Sigh.
Now there's a legacy.
Sigh.
