On Thanksgiving morning, just before sunrise, my beloved grandmother shed her earthly skin. I’m at total loss for words, just sitting in heartache and sobbing. Nothing can fully prepare us for the day. The hour. The moment when death comes for us. It’s an indescribable pain and completely powerless feeling to watch someone dear to […]
My grandparents circa 1948, laying in the grass at Montgomery Bell State Park. They were newlyweds, and their faces say it all. My grandfather’s best friend married my aunt Hazel (grandmas sister), and that’s how they met. My uncle Ed brought my grandfather down to meet my grandma and they took the girls on a […]
During the early 1950s, my grandfather was Clark Gable’s and Victor Mature’s translator for the filming of “Betrayed” in Sittard, a quaint town in southern Holland where my maternal family has roots since the early 1900s. At that time my grandfather, Bep, (the grandkids called him Opa) was one of the very few in Sittard […]
I love this picture. It’s my parents on their honeymoon along with…ta da…my mother’s mother! My grandfather took the picture. Why were my grandparents on the honeymoon? Because they went everywhere with my parents, and my father was a good sport about it. The wedding actually took place in February, so they postponed the honeymoon a […]
Meet my paternal grandma, Rosemary Kooken White, pictured here as a toddler in the late 1920s. Rosemary had a Valentine’s birthday. She was the youngest of four, the little sister of two brothers and a sister. Her mother passed away when she was very young and her brothers stayed with their father. So Rosemary and […]
Winter Wonderland, worthy of family memories! Thanks to my sis Janis for this one. That’s her on the left, and I’m the little one in the sled. When we cleaned out our mom’s house, I brought home this very same antique red sled, and it held pots of mom’s geraniums at my shop all this […]
Ten years go by so fast. Your grandson is now nine and your granddaughter will be six at the end of the month. One of the biggest tragedies of my life has been the fact that you never had the opportunity to meet each other. This photo was taken with a Polaroid Pronto in 1977 […]
I’m about to embark on a huge, long journey and all I can think of is my grandparents. My grandpa had an amazing military career and was a great man, but today all I can think about is that everywhere he went, all over the world, he did handstands. I mean, he walked miles on […]
Meet my great grandfather William David Brown, who was born in 1892 in Scotland and married Daisy Benford in 1917. They met before World War I, probably through their fathers, who were both coachmen. They lived just around the corner from Buckingham Palace. William was already serving in the British Army at the outbreak of […]
I am the adult child of divorced parents, and the fact that I come from a broken family is a pretty good metaphor for our family photo archives. My dad had some, my mom had some, I had some, and my sisters had some. They were in albums, boxes, envelopes, and there were even handfuls […]
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