We found a whole trailer full of family stuff this afternoon.
My dad and I were busily sinking 4x4s in the hopes of suspending the heavy punching bag and getting a workout. It should be noted that digging post holes through Virginia red clay is plenty of a workout, all by itself, as is toting lumber and mixing concrete. Anyway, we wanted to find the bag … and my dad remembered that it was in the trailer they used to move stuff down from DC to here.
We opened up the trailer, and it was full of boxes. Many of these boxes said things like “old family photos.”
Yep, so now I’ve got eight banker-boxes sitting on the table, here in the schoolhouse, looking at me. I decided to take a look through them:
* naturalization certificates from the late 1800’s
* Photos of my grandfather, in his 20s.
* Pictures of my great, great grandmother … cooking something on a stove.
* A letter of introduction from a parish church in Prussia … which my ancestors carried across the ocean with them in the hopes that it would be of some good with the Prussian community in Detroit.
Now I’ve got the scanner out, and I’m plugging through a few of them. I dunno … it seems that the paper is going to fall apart pretty soon here, but if I can go digital then these things will survive at least a little longer.
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