“When our hearts turn to our ancestors, something changes inside us. We feel part of something greater than ourselves.” -Russell M. Nelson Sometimes, the best way to make sense of the present is to look to the past. After all, our stories started before us and will be continued by the next generation. Today, we […]
Last Thursday, I took my 90 year old father to the emergency room after he showed great weakness and confusion. While my 4 brothers and I waited for the doctor, my Mom (87) stepped outside the exam room into the hallway where she tripped and broke her hip, requiring hospitalization and surgery the following day. […]
“The day she had her curls cut off,” it says on the back. My grandfather found my grandmother’s stash of things, her things that he hasn’t touched since she died in 1992. Apparently, there was a very special book, an album that belonged to my great-great grandmother Blanche! And here she is, Blanche Dolton nee […]
My grandmother Jane was a nurse during WWII, she spoke Japanese, and raised my mother as a single parent. On my best days, it is my hope that I might be regarded as half the woman she was. For the sake of brevity, to tell you how this photo truly moves me, you must know […]
If you digitize your family archives but don’t share them, are you really preserving them? Simply put, the answer is NO. Your old analog photos and videos are treasure troves of memories. In fact, they are stories waiting to be brought to life. So digitizing them is only half the battle. Once they are digitized, you need to take the […]
Lew Galloway (1883-1962) was my great grandfather, my father’s grandfather. I never met him; he died a decade before I was born. Growing up in a small town in western Kansas, I knew the old-timers who knew Lew. They spoke of him in a way that made him seem larger than life. I have his […]
Your memories may be in danger. Here’s why: memories are the strongest links to your ancestors, but they disappear if you don’t preserve them. And old family photos are like little time machines; they transport you to a place called memory. Recently, I experienced this time-travel firsthand when I went to visit my 101-year-old grandmother. I took […]
Mom and her Mom, Vietnam, early 1950s. We left Vietnam in early 1975, when I was just 14 months old, and my grandparents stayed behind. I didn’t see them again until they emigrated to the United States in 1984, when I was 10 years old. My ba ngoai (maternal grandmother) was by that point in […]
As I continue to sort family photos, I find surprises tucked away in the oddest corners…like this one. I love this snapshot of my mother and my grandmother on the beach, probably on the Chilean coast, where we are originally from. My mother and my grandmother were fashionistas, my mother in the New York cosmopolitan […]
The gift of memory and storytelling is something that should always be held dear, and recently I’ve really begun to treasure these stories that my grandparents tell – even if I’ve heard them a hundred times – to have them told by Eugene and Alice themselves is pretty great. My family will always remember Grandpa’s […]
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