2024 #52Ancestors, Week 19: Preserve

Let's talk about the difficulties of preserving family history.  If you're like me, you have a full-time job that takes up much of your time - time that you would much rather be spending tracking down elusive ancestors.  Maybe you are also raising children.  I have a daughter.  She is in elementary school, so her folder must be checked and emptied every night, and there are always birthday party invitations to consider and permission slips to be signed.  On top of these responsibilities, we also have a yard to maintain and a vegetable garden to manage.  The garden is substantial - it used to be a 20x40 in-ground pool.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I steal an hour or two in the evenings to work on genealogical mysteries with my distant cousin, Heather.  What I'm saying here is that preserving family history takes time.

Time, however, is not the only necessity.

I inherited this stack of boxes from my grandparents when my maternal grandfather passed away in 2022.  I have sifted through them multiple times, trying to organize the photos into Grandma's side or Grandpa's side.  I have made some progress, but as you can probably tell from the items unrelated to genealogy piled in the foreground, these boxes have been sitting on the table for some time.  In fact, these photos have been sitting on a table in our dining room since October of last year.  They had been sitting on the floor in my library, but we rescued a dog, and I didn't want to risk finding out the hard way that he was a chewer.

Speaking of the library, this old TV stand has been repurposed into a coffee table for our book room.  Inside it, you will find another collection of genealogy materials.  I have my mother's DAR application (putting in my own application has been on my to-do list for some time), a cabinet card album full of my great grandparents' relatives, a book on dating photos using fashion, an assortment of pictures my dad gave me of his aunts and uncles, books detailing the tips and tricks of genealogy, a CD of information about my Arter relatives...and who knows what else.  The point is that while preserving family history takes time, it also takes space.  

You might ask, what is the point of this post?  Just this.  Thank your family preservationist because he/she has certainly dedicated more time and space to this calling than you realize.