Family Archives: Intriguing Finds

 

Working my way through the boxes, I find such interesting things. Last night, I found a postcard my grandfather sent my grandmother in 1916, before they were married. These people are strangers to me - my grandfather dead decades before I was born, my grandmother frozen mentally in the Victorian times she was raised. But how cute!

It's a penny postcard of the veterinary college he attended, sent to her at the family farm where she lived, age 19.

"Say don't you think you had better get busy? Big basketball game on tonight, vets vs. Lawyers. "Noble" is feeling rather "indisposed" again, has kind of a "grip".  ONS"

Was she invited to the game? Who is "Noble"? A friend? Or an animal patient? Things I will never know.

Family Archives

My mother in high school

I am the family archivist. This comes to me naturally. I was the family photographer, starting in the 1980s. I physically inherited boxes of documents and photos from my father and my mother. I had a brief engagement with family genealogy in the 1990s, and have some partial family trees from that era. I missed an opportunity to review old family photos with my mother, and so a lot of that knowledge is lost forever. Who are these old people in these stiff and faded photos? I just remember old Hester Anne, with her clay pipe, born in 1830. But where on the family tree is she?

I'm paying for a storage unit, where I put some furniture and many boxes after my mother died. I finally decided I needed to make a start on the boxes. I stopped by, and brought a few home and tossed them in the spare room. But before I tackled them, I though I spend a few minutes on the stuff already at my house.

My father in 1952,
when he got his PhD

I was quickly overwhelmed. There is simply too much, it's too diverse, I couldn't decide how to handle it. My initial thought had been to sort and scan as I went, tossing some things outright, others after a scan, and saving few physical items. Though my desktop scanner is of decent quality, it is very slow, and I realized Plan A was simply not going to work. So I stepped back, and spent some time thinking and researching how to organize the project. I didn't want to get too far into it before having to re-do everything I'd already done.

I'm a natural librarian, and I have professional librarian friends. I also have friends in similar situations wanting to tackle similar projects. So I got some sage advice, from physically how to handle the materials to digitally how to set up a filing system. One of the main points is to do a physical sort first, without engaging with any of the materials in depth. Sorting by family branch / family member, and/or by year, seem to be the leading alternatives. And, toss stuff in this first sort. Be realistic. My parents traveled a lot, but does anyone need pictures they took of European buildings, with no recognizable people? Of course not. Keep a trash bag nearby.

It's hard to stick to the guideline of "don't engage" when dealing with documents (as opposed to photos). I have to review them enough to know what I'm looking at. And then it can be hard not to get sucked in. For example, I found a stack of sympathy cards I had received after my sister died. My memories of that time are extremely hazy. I sat down and looked at all the cards, and put them into an archival envelope to keep. They won't be scanned, but maybe I'll look at them again in a few years.

At that point, I realized why the advice is not to engage with the material as you move through it. I was a little bit comforted and also a little bit blue after going through those little bits of thoughtfulness that had come at my most bleak time ever. I needed another break before getting back to it.

So today, with two inches of rain forecast, I dove back in. There was necessarily some spool-up time, as I needed to remind myself how I was doing the physical sort. I know I've decided many photos need to be scanned by a service as doing it myself isn't physically possible. But each service has its rules for how to sort and label batches, so for the time being I'm just grouping by rough family group and date. So all of those will need to be handled again, when I review detailed instructions from a scanning service. Documents can also follow the same rough sort, with another distinction between records (diplomas, birth certificates) and more personal stuff. Probably, documents that get scanned will be scanned by me.

Hester Anne. Note clay pipe.
One of the girls is probably my grandmother

I pulled out a bag - roughly a plastic grocery bag sized bag, and dove in. As it turned out, this bag held stuff from my father's mother, Haila Yvonne Miller Shellabarger. It appears she saved every letter or photograph my father ever sent her. The big surprise - and a treasure trove - is that he wrote to her a lot.  In 1957, the year my family first lived in London, he typed out a tissue-thin blue air letter nearly every week to her. Mundane doings of our young naive American family having an adventure abroad. But there are letters before and after that time as well - somewhere between 50 and 100 in total, I guess. So I sorted out the letters by year, and put them in envelopes for dealing with later. I'm really looking forward to working my way through them. But for now, they are all in a box labelled "Shellabarger - to be scanned."

Most of the photographs are copies my parents sent them. Everything peters out in the mid-1960s. Did long distance become affordable then? Or maybe, more recent things are in another box!

So I packed everything up again, and I'll do more sorting and organizing when next it rains or snows - that will be Wednesday, most likely!

Dear Marilyn and Claire

I finally got through what I think (hope!) is the last of the paper-filled boxes from my mother's apartment. I have had new boxes spread out on the bed in the guest room for close to a year, each labeled with family names. As I went through my mother's boxes, I sorted papers I wanted to keep, without reading them beyond the point of deciding if I was going to keep them. So I have a box labeled "Shellabargers" with items from that side of the family, one labeled "Olsens" for that side, and so on. (At some point in the future I may dive into the contents further, and perhaps digitize some of it, certainly actually read the stuff). I actually thought I was done with document boxes earlier, but as I went to clean out the guest room, I discovered one more box. 

It was a great find! Full of important documents such as death certificates, it also contained a treasure trove of correspondence. Back in the day, people wrote letters. ("The Day" seems to have died out with the turn of the century, when email became the thing, later supplanted with social media.) This particular pile of correspondence was letters sent to my parents, dating from the 1960s through to the last poignant one dated 2008. That final one was from an old friend from Bellport to my mother, writing from her assisted living facility, disclosing her early Alzheimer's diagnosis, and going on to describe her continuing serious commitment to her church, including serving every week as a lay reader, "as long as I can".

I sorted the letters by sender, without reading them, but if they were from family or significant friends that wrote a lot, I put them in the appropriate box for later. Many documents in this last box went directly into paper recycling (who needs the caterer's invoice from my sister's wedding?) but I set aside into a separate pile some handwritten correspondence from people I didn't know or only vaguely remembered. It didn't feel right to just toss these letters without looking at them first. 

So last night, I sat down and read this handful of items. Many of them were touching, and I thought to preserve some of the anecdotes or aspects about my parents they reveal. 

My father was a professor at the University of Michigan, and there were several letters from former graduate students, in the United States and abroad. I was very surprised to see sincere thank you notes from a few former students, expressing in the strongest terms their gratitude for "your very generous gift". I'm guessing from additional clues my parents assisted these folks financially, in more than just a token way. I had no idea! My parents were fortunate indeed to be in a position to do this, and it gives new resonance to the way they drilled into me that wealth is not a sign of virtue, but a fortunate happenstance that should be shared.

One especially amusing letter I read was from my mother's friend from the neighborhood in Ann Arbor. Having children the same age is one of the things that cements relationships, and this friendship withstood eventual physical separation. Ruth was still living in Ann Arbor when I went to college there, and so the letter discusses what they had seen of me ("I think she has made a great adjustment and is quite content here.") The letter has notes of her despair over her boys, pursuing arts and fun things, ignoring their engineer/physicist dad's pleas to be practical. And she notes with humor and some irritation her husband's interviewing for a presidential appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission. "He was recently interviewed in some office surrounded by pictures of the Nixon family...  Nixon's men really zeroed in on his political life... It has been strangely quiet here since Bill stated in answer to a question that he could not always support President Nixon's programs or views... Maybe their Watergate guys have figured out we voted for McGovern!" Ruth was cognizant of the honor to her husband of being considered, but was greatly relieved it didn't happen.

The church in Bellport was very important to both my parents, and I already noted the letter above from one of their close friends from there. Our family was roiled by tragedy when the minister of the church committed suicide in 1971, when my brother and I were in high school. At that age, in my mind the tragedy was all about my reaction to it. So my memories of that time are only of me and my friends. I knew my parents over time became close friends of the widow, who remained in Bellport. But I was surprised to read a long letter from the mother of the deceased minister. She lived in Paris, before and after the tragedy, but had of course gone to Bellport immediately the news of her son's suicide reached her. She was writing to my parents some months later from Paris, thanking them for their extraordinary support while she was there, and asking them to let her know if the widow and children were not coping, and if she (the mother) should return to New York. Think about the intimacy that implies, for people who had never met until brought together by tragedy!

On a related note, my parents became very close friends with the new minister and his family at the church, standing as godparents to their daughter. He went on to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, and there are a stack of letters from him and his wife to my parents. But I read some pleasant notes from another church lady friend of my parents who actually peppered her notes to my mother with some snark about that second minister, snubs and thoughtless moments. Huh. I never would have known from everyone's more public behavior.

Many of my parents' closest friends for life were from their time in graduate school at Indiana University right after World War II. It was a happening time and place for biological sciences, but it was also a time where folks in their twenties (and early thirties - after de-mobilization) were getting married, finding jobs, and having their first children, forming indelible bonds. One of their intimates was James Watson, famous as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA (and later infamous for acknowledging having used data stolen without consent from a female researcher to make the discovery, and even more recently infamous for expressing repugnant sexist and racist ideas about the role of genetics in human society).  I grew up on anecdotes about how he was actually kind of a jerk, tossed into a lake once by his roommates at a summer institute for neglecting his personal hygiene. At the same time, my parents were careful to acknowledge their friendship and genuine liking for him. So it was interesting to read some notes exchanged between my mother and a female friend from grad school (like my mother, once a budding scientist in a world of sexism, later a wife and mother) giggling about the controversy surrounding the publication / withdrawal from publication / subsequent new publication of his book, The Double Helix. Also giggles about the 40-year-old Harvard professor Watson's contemporaneous marriage to a Radcliffe 19-old undergraduate. This woman wrote about her "very close relationship [with Watson] that most likely would have become permanent" back then except for the intervention of their major professor, "who viewed any emotional liaison of Jim's as being tantamount to his intellectual suicide". Celebrity gossip, Shellabarger style!

I regret the loss of this form of communication. Not enough to start writing letters to people, but maybe enough to consider preserving on paper some more important email notes. Those immediately following my sister's death, for example. I tried to make sure I preserved them, electronically, but I haven't looked for them for years. Yet another rainy day project.

NOTE: Originally published on Buddy, May 2022