The Beginning ...

There are pros and cons to a family that collects. For many generations my family has collected a variety of interesting memorabilia. Photographs are the family history that I embrace. During moves from one home to another; boxes of the past have been pushed to the back of closets and attics and only get attention on the next move. Now faced with downsizing my parents’ condominium all of the boxes of our past must be sorted and their contents saved or discarded.

My mother and I have spent many hours analyzing photographs that date back to the 1880s. Like a puzzle, we have uncovered seven generations on my maternal grandmother’s side. Often when we open a new box that we know comes from my grandmother’s past we are no longer surprised to see new photographs, always new faces. Over the years these photographs begin to tell the story and the faces become familiar. When we come upon duplicates it is like seeing an old friend. I truly wish that we had all of the stories that match the images.

As we were searching through boxes a few years ago we uncovered the majority of the letters that my grandfather sent to my grandmother. We spent weeks sorting them by date and put them in order – a large task. Then life took over and before we knew it we could not find the letters and I feared that they were lost. I tried not to let my frustration take over and believed that we would find them somewhere – we could not have thrown them away by mistake.

I was going through piles in the basement moving and sorting and feeling very overwhelmed with all of the piles – on a whim, I looked under a piece of sculpture and saw a clear plastic storage box. I carefully lifted the sculpture and turned to my mother and said “Huckle Buckle Beanstalk!” I was thinking that it would be interesting to do a real time blog. I wanted to see the time frame of the letters and when I opened the box the earliest date was January 22, 1913. There it was, a one hundred year timeline. It could not have been better.

My hope is to share this with the family and friends that were touched by the life of my grandparents, those too young to have known them and those strangers always looking for a good historical romance.

Their story will unfold on this blog through the eyes of a gentleman Judge Joseph George Shapiro to his “girl” Helen Rosenstein.