MAKE A SCRAPBOOK

My husband and I met ten days after my 16th birthday. In the early days of our dating, my Aunt Fannie almost demanded that I keep a scrapbook of memorabilia from our adventures. Obediently, I routinely filled pages with ticket stubs, playbills, dried flowers from corsages and bouquets, hair clippings, photographs, and various other pieces of our dating history.

This hobby led me to create a framed 30 x 40 collage to showcase our 25th anniversary as husband and wife. That was in the year 2000. After carrying boxes and boxes down from storage on our third floor and neatly packing them in my car, I drove directly to the local frame shop. As I walked in carrying only the first box, the owner commented incredulously that he never saw so much memorabilia. For this, I have Aunt Fannie to thank. 

What will the minimalists of this generation have to look back on or frame and enjoy? Will there be pictures to go with their writings? Some of the most exuberating parts of writing my weekly blog post come from thinking up the titles and deciding on the appropriate photographs to go with them. Usually, I work on my blogs in that order, heading, picture/s, story, or picture/s, heading, story. Whatever the order, when I have the title and the picture/s, it makes it easier to write the story.

A local furniture company gifted my 1971 high school graduating class miniature Lane brand hope chests. I still have mine, which I filled with various items that wouldn’t fit in my scrapbook. Most likely, those collections fueled my ambition to keep daily calendars of the milestones and adventures of our babies throughout the years. 

In the summer of 2019, at a friend’s house for a BBQ, before the COVID-19 pandemic, when you could do things like get together with friends and socialize in groups, I smiled with nostalgia at the pictures in her dining room breakfront. My friend did not smile back. Instead, she sounded morose as she reported that her only child is a minimalist. He told her he would not be saving any of the pictures she so lovingly displays of family and friends. My jaw dropped. It was mind-boggling to me, a passionate genealogist, that her son could show such disinterest in pictures depicting the life of his family.

That reminded me of a cousin who emigrated from Ukraine, leaving pictures hanging on the walls. When I learned that he made it to America, I contacted him through his English-speaking grandson and invited him to our house. He responded that he knew my part of the family as his parents received packages from us in the late 1940s. I explained that while I was not yet alive, my Aunt Fannie used to help my grandmother pack packages to send to the family in Eastern Europe.

Enthusiastically asking my newly found cousin for photographs of our ancestors was met with huge disappointment. Unexpectedly, his reaction was to mope and drop his head. Our mutual cousin Alla, who arrived with him for a visit from Brooklyn, translated his sad statement. She told me he was sorry, but he left them all hanging on the walls in his apartment in Kiev. 

Based on the information in letters and documents that Aunt Fannie saved from our ancestors in Eastern Europe, I was able to piece together my father’s large, long-lost family and meet most of my relatives, starting with Alla. Best of all, I shared the documents written in their native language.

Most recently, when letters came from the son of a deceased nonagenarian in my husband’s family, reading the letters dated in the 1950s once again sent chills down my spine. My father-in-law’s cousin Trudy saved the descriptive letters from her mother. A doting grandmother wrote adoringly about the children of Trudy’s three older brothers. Such an unexpected family treasure was memorabilia important enough to share in my family newsletters. 

After reading her handwritten thoughts, which mention their names, cousins now inching up to the age of their grandmother’s years when she penned the letters, movingly responded. Thankfully, no one threw out the letters, which were stashed away for years. Instead, they went through many hands, and now the descendants can enjoy a small time capsule about family life in America a decade after WWII.

Letter dated August 4, 1955

Tante Lena - Trudy’s mother - 6-15-1975 Walking down the aisle as our “grandmother for the day” at our wedding

We didn’t know then that she babysat for Golda Meir, in Pinsk, where she was born and raised, before immigrating to America

In America she met and married Golda’s second cousin Arthur Neidich - my husband knew him as his grandmother’s brother-his granduncle Alter

Miniature Lane brand cedar-lined hope chest - notice the pin found inside…try a little KINDNESS - history repeating itself

Twenty-fifth Anniversary framed collage June 15, 2000

Tante Lena Neidich with Sharon Mark Cohen at her June 15, 1975 wedding West Orange, New Jersey